India(ish): An Absurd & Awful Saga - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

One thousand kilometres. One pair of flip-flops. No idea.

The plan was to walk across India, from the Buddha’s fig tree to the Taj Mahal. National Geographic spreads. A Discovery Channel special. It lasted two days — undone not by tigers, malaria, or bandits, but by a man in a knitted sweater who thought Mark Walters looked unusual.

What follows is the journey he took instead: buses, trains, and whatever else would have him, from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal.

He fails at yoga; is groped, propositioned, and blessed. He loses his dignity to a camel and a staring contest to a one-eyed twelve-year-old. He visits a town taking orders from a dead Frenchwoman called The Mother, drinks a bhang lassi that turns a quiet afternoon into a hostage situation inside his own skull, and is comprehensively dismantled by a Keralan assessing his marriage prospects. (“Maybe you are not as good as you think.”)

And between the jokes, the other India: a man whose great-uncle set out from Pakistan in 1947 and never arrived, a girl practising her typing on a computer that will never switch on, and, in Kolkata, a woman on a pavement whom everyone else steps around.

Funny, filthy, and considerably more honest than it intends to be, Indiaish is a book about going somewhere to be transformed and being thoroughly outclassed by the place instead. It contains no epiphanies. That isn't an oversight.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.