So in a way I guess I was being masochistic.

I did race through the book, finishing it in two sittings on the two segments of the flight. The characters initially were engrossing and the East-West amalgam held me really tight for some time. The book, in three sections, is about Samar, the representative of a lost generation and his times in Benares, Pondicherry and Dharamsala and his eventual return to Benares. The first two build up Samar's stay in Benares and Pondicherry but the third hurtles through his stay in Dharamsala and return to Benares, giving an impression that Mishra was probably running out of time to meet the deadline for the book's publication.

In Benares, Samar comes across Miss West and Catherine, a Britisher and Frenchwoman respectively, and their friends, who have been living for some time in Benares, trying to find themselves. At this level, Mishra tries to compare Western and Indian problems and values; the problems of the pain of adulthood, of love and longing (or the lack of) and draws parallels between the problems that Miss West and Catherine have with the problems that Samar and his Indian friends have. Samar's "Indian" connection is mainly sketched through his interactions with Rajesh, a college Union ganglord and his cronies.

Along the way, Mishra flirts with the concept of "detachment" as a Hindu way out of problems, only to denounce it eventually. Samar's father retires to the Aurobindo ashram after his wife passes away and eventually Samar hides himself in Dharamsala to get away from memories of Benares and Catherine, with whom he had spent a memorable holiday in Kalpi. Yet, a chance meeting in Dharamsala with Mark, seven years after leading what seems to be a good, comfortable life suddenly makes Samar doubt his own choices. From this point onwards though, the book takes a downhill course.

Samar in any case comes across as a "detached" individual, probably because he is also the character through whom Mishra views the rest of the cast and in that sense seems to represent a part of Mishra's own personality. This "detached" approach makes Samar an extremely wishy-washy character who just seems to blunder along life's by-lanes, going where his destiny takes him, with minimal dissent. The only time he seems to have emotions, is when he experiences a high during and after his tryst with Catherine.

One reason I found the book interesting in parts was because the problems described in Samar's part of the world are different from those in Mumbai. Different parts of India sometimes are as dissimilar as different parts of the world. The city of Benares, which I have never visited, the problems in the Universities in Benares and Allahabad, the concept of everyone reading and trying for the Civil Service examinations, are situations as alien to me as they might be to a Westerner, having led my whole life in Mumbai, not knowing any student who studied for the Civil Service examinations, or kept pistols in his room in college, or threw a grenade on a policeman. But people from UP or Bihar or other parts of the country would probably find all this commonplace and boring.

At the end of it all though, the book left me with a sense of dissatisfaction. What was Mishra trying to say? If it is just a story about an individual and his travails and soul-searching, then the end is too abrupt. If it is a commentary on India, its poverty, filth, middle-class amorality and the travesties of religion, it works well, but upto a point. Book after book dwells on this subject and Mishra says nothing new. If it is about the similarities between Western and Indian problems of the soul, but the different approaches adopted by the two, it works for sometime and then falters, leaving us confused.

And the "Indian" motifs pandering to the West are alive and kicking. Like the passage describing the making of "dal", spelt "dhal" where the process of making "tadka" is explained in half a page "...after the onion and garlic turned a deep golden-brown, he would tremulously lift the bowl with a steel pincer and gently pour it into the brass tureen, where, after a brief noisy protest, the ghee would tamely spread across the watery surfaces of the dhal."

The problem in the end is the sense of "giving up" that seems to pervade every Indian character in the book. Just as in "Fasting, Feasting" and "The Blue Bedspread", every character has a problem and is unhappy and troubled. When will someone write a book about normal middle and upper middle class life in India, about the fun you have in school, in college, in professional situations, and sometimes even at work? That there are people who are content and successful and not criminal and fat and paunchy with beaded eyes and greasy hands. And though you can never wipe away the backdrop of poverty and disaster, not everyone leads these lives.

Do poverty, filth and decay have to be our only export?