This wasn’t the latest “who-done-it” caper novel, rather an amusing tale of one woman’s India adventure. A journey that started and ended like many traveler’s stories. That is until an impending divorce forced the author to make some tough choices. Choices which led her back to India, and an environment where she, like many other travelers before her, found solace and direction.

I purposely sought out a copy of Henna for the Heart-Broken while in Delhi, believing it was a book that would feel even more authentic while I acted as a vagabond among the countryside of India. As the author recounted her story, each page left me thinking about my own travels in India, specifically how I too felt healed by India. Even when all signals pointed toward happy endings in my life, a trip to India came when I needed a subtle push to keep striving toward my goals, to stay humble in my surroundings, to seek out new friendships with complete strangers only to count them as extended family thousands of miles away from home.

Henna for the Broken-Hearted is a quick read for either the India novice or Indophile thanks to the author’s comfortable narration. Her story leads readers from her home country of Australia to India, where we get to revel in entertaining recollections of the need to adapt to a life seemingly less complicated, yet ever more frustrating. In the end, the author finds a new path which many a traveler has dreamed of following. A path which led her, like symbolic henna designs, twisting, turning, sometimes moving toward dead ends, but always for a reason.

Where to Buy USA and Abroad

Henna for the Broken-Hearted on iTunes

HennaForTheBrokenHearted.com

No matter though. The author is keenly aware of her readership, thus taking a few extra steps to ensure we follow the newest escapade as she matures into a young woman. As the pages turn, Shoba moves from a young girl growing up in India to what may be a short term educational stint in the US. Humor ensues as she struggles to understand the American way of life. A return to India to regroup and plan a permanent residence in the US allows just enough time for her family to remind her of traditional Indian values. No longer a little girl, the author must now face her family and neighbor’s cries for marriage. As with her recipes, she’ll do it her way.

It took me several months to complete Monsoon Diary for no other reason then I didn’t want it to end. During that time I took a break from a relationship of 4 years, continued to write for Full Stop India, began organizing my 6th return to India, and ultimately finished reading this spry memoir while overnighting in the foothills of the Aravali Mountians. With no TV, no internet, no phone, and often times with no power, the final pages of the book were read as the sun rose in the sky. Sipping hot chai, the nearby natural spring flowed past in eager enthusiasm to get somewhere else. As the village around me began to wake up, I savored the last morsels of Shoba Narayan’s writing.

Monsoon Diary succeeds in telling a tale of India in a way that countless books fail before turning the first page. This book should be at the top of the list of any first time traveler to, or enthusiast of India. Read with a highlighter to mark follow up topics, gain new insight into how the Indian family works, how they view their own culture, and of course, which foods are preferred favorites.

But it’s the Ambassador car which pulls the pictures together. In just sixty years of production, the Amby has effectively become one of the most iconic symbols of India. And it stars in some capacity in every shot. In one photograph, a Dutch church stands in the background, shot from the front seat where we can see the smudges of the windshield and wipers. But it’s the rear view mirror which captures the sight of a classic white Amby, delivering the final element and juxtaposition with modern India.

Or maybe it’s the shot from the backseat where we see the door opened wide, window rolled down and a young woman, long curly black locks and inquisitive look wearing a gray sweatshirt that mystifies us. She wears no tilak, no sari or salwar kameez as she’s hunched into the photograph in front of a horse drawn tonga and the moghal era Red Fort in the background.

Singh delivers a brilliant book for anyone who has an affinity for India. Unfortunately this was his last project before death came in 1999, and testament of love for his country. This is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who has yearned to travel or has already visited India. A country that continues to evolve from, yet clings to, it’s rich, colorful past.

“Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well.”

And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power’s journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways — woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds, and from them learns the skills that were passed on to them from their own mothers. Power takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine, and the female psyche, with recipes and stories from each chapter revealing the struggle of modern women, both American and of Indian descent, searching for identity and a definition of what it means to be a woman today.

The recipes shared in this collection are far from ordinary; they are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India — from homemade cheese cubes in a rich cilantro and almond curry to coconut-stuffed okra and luscious potato-curry dumplings. Power’s recipes and stories pave the road to understanding a culture that is at the same time ancient and so very much part of our modern world.

Nani Power’s concept is smart and simple. Place an ad on Craigslist for Indians interested in teaching this middle aged, divorced mother of two how to cook proper Indian meals. But right from the beginning, it’s clear the book is struggling for compelling content and the author is grasping at straws to deliver enough storyline to fill a hardcover printing.

The first 19 pages are a jumbled mess of ideas from Ms Power’s long interest in cooking & longing for new foods to relationships, love, Feminism, spices and the Indian God Ganesh. Readers are repeatedly reminded how she is struggling to make ends meet on her writer salary all the while telling herself she is content at being alone (yet speaks about love and relationships incessantly). Add in the simple fact the author has not traveled to India, and it’s hard to keep an unbiased opinion throughout the pages.

The recounting of her shared cooking experiences, the crux of the book, comes off as lightweight fodder. More detail into the lives of each teacher is lacking, a shame given the chance to learn so much more than just a recipe. As a writer, you would think Ms Power would be delving into a laundry list of conversation starters with her hosts, but she backs away stating her concern for Indian etiquette and customs.

Half way into the book an odd love story-arc is introduced. Clearly designed to keep female readers interested, the gist of her love for Indian food has now translated into an interest in Indian men. And as much as the 48 year old Ms Power professes countless times not to be a cougar, her relationship with a 20 something Indian college student appears to be nothing short of a codependent train wreck that both parties can’t walk away from. The retelling of their nights of fighting, yelling, and unending phone calls proves to be as interesting as watching water boil.

Each teacher flits in and out of the author’s life quicker than Uncle Ben’s instant rice is finished. Although she writes as if it is the Indian women who move on or create obstacles to keep up the lessons, Ms Power’s self mentioned past bares some weight in the failing of these relationships.

While a great idea, Ginger and Ganesh would have been better off as a brilliantly written magazine article or Sunday newspaper cover story. Instead, the bloated storyline is distracted with too much talk of not wanting to bring women back into the kitchen even as she admits it would be beneficial to the household on many levels. Oddly lost are her kids who are only briefly mentioned as guinea pigs during her Indian culinary crusade. Ms Power ultimately discovers that life with a young Indian man, however dysfunctional, is better than no relationship. And Ganesh, well he’s just there as a symbol she seeks throughout the cooking lessons as a sign of comfort. It makes for a catchy title.

Ginger and Ganesh is a basket full of crazy which left me feeling sorry for the families who endured their time with the author. Skip this title if for nothing else, the bargain bin 1000 Greatest Indian Recipes found at nearly every corner bookshop.

Limiting oneself to just 50 of the greatest Indian snacks is a feat in itself. Add to it rich, colorfully detailed photos of individual snacks direct from the streets of various cities across India, and you have this substantially sized hardcover book good enough for the coffee table or kitchen collection.

Actual photos taken around Bombay, Delhi, Amritsar and Varanasi, show readers just how ingrained street vendors are in the Indian palette. And while the selections truly are some of the best snacks, many of which I have sampled, a broad representation from all corners of the country are missing.

DIY recipes are included for the most passionate to attempt in recreating at home. But, as any lover of street food will attest to, part of the joy in handing over your cash in exchange for a freshly steamed momo or fried samosa, is the experience of eating with others in the open as the world passes.

First time travelers will enjoy comparing their notes while learning a bit more about the food represented in the book. Locals and repeat tourists will read the book as a trip down memory lane; Memories of places where you drank the best cup of chai, or encountered a night of restless pain at the hands of tainted food just a few hours earlier. Either way, it left me hungry and eager to return to the streets.

E.M. Forster cleverly incorporates the disdain of English Ex Pats with the stereotype of Indian curiosity and over reaching desire to please. Set in India during the British time of rule, the book centers around a small group of key players. The reader is quickly swept into the facade the British created in order to “bear” the inconvenience of residing in India. It was for the Queen, but was she mad?

Some tourists want to see the “real” India, while others are content to see what they believe to be real. Two main English characters, both ladies, are just that tourist. Both set out to find India on a deeper level, one already feeling it in her bones, and the other as a way to escape her inevitable future. But it’s really Dr. Aziz who stands out for me.

Good Muslim, consummate professional, eager to please and honest; These are but a few outstanding qualities the reader easily sees in Dr. Aziz. Often I think about the interaction Aziz has with Fielding at his bungalow early in the pages. Fielding has lost a collar stay, Aziz gives him his own as a token of friendship, brotherhood really, claiming he carries an extra around at all times. Fielding curiously accepts the collar stay. Later both are seen at the Club where, after Aziz leaves, several English ladies dissect his appearance. Specifically noted is the missing collar stay. When traveling India, I can’t help but think of Aziz on a daily basis. How many times do I come in contact with Indians eager to please me, yet I’ll never know what they truly sacrificed for my happiness? Do they ever wonder if their token of kindness is fully appreciated?

Before any journey to India, before you even purchase tickets, pick up this book. The British may be long gone but the mannerisms & relationships between Indians and tourists are very much alive. To understand even a fraction of their culture through this book will enhance your trip ten fold.

Enter the female counterpart, who attracts his attention and focus throughout his stay in Venice. Short, crudely written scenes between himself, a mid-40′s man obsessed with sex and how old he feels, and this woman, made me wonder if a “child from within” had taken over the writing. If the author’s agenda was to form a nasty distaste for his own characters, he succeeded brilliantly.

Enter India, and Jeff’s trip to Varanasi. The notion that Jeff could agree to an assignment just days before a scheduled arrival in India, a prolonged stay at an mildly expensive hotel on his income level; truth in this story was getting harder to find. The pages crept on and on bringing questions about where the story was going. Would there be some hidden meaning in all of it at the end? Was I already missing the point?

In general conversation with my friend Bakul one evening, we discovered we were reading the same book. Not only that, we were within pages of each other. A few questions bounced back and forth before it I realized we were both somewhat disturbed by the book’s progress. He was shuffling between 3 books, I just had the one on the backburner.

But then I picked it up and read. The pages turned and turned until there were no more. Feeling the author had a “top tourist sites” list, pulled directly from any Varanasi guide book, which he used to name drop throughout each paragraph faded away. Replaced was a heavy head wondering why there wasn’t more! The first 100 pages were read while sitting on the express train from Chennai to Bangalore. Envisioning Venice while the Indian countryside passed by seemed like blasphemy. Finishing the book back in the USA, while missing India, has left me thinking I undersold the book. While I won’t reread it soon…a revisit into the pages of Jeff will present itself in my future, hopefully in Varanasi.

The knowledge gained from this short read (109 pages) can also be applied to other religions, their places of worship and their religious figures in print and sculpture. However, for the born Hindu or outsider looking to expand their understanding of this religion, this book is a first-class read.

Synopsis

Although the role of the visual is essential to Indian tradition and culture, most attempts to understand its images are laden with misperceptions. Darsan, a Sanskrit word that means “seeing,” is an aid to our vision, a book of ideas to help us read, think, and look at Hindu images with tolerance and imagination.

Review

“As fine an explanation of temple worship and use of Deity images as can be found. Darsan will give the Hindu deeper insight into the practices of his own religion, provide explanations for non-Hindu friends, and convey useful konowledge to his children.” — Hinduism Today

Simply one of the best short introductions to Hinduism available. . . . Belongs in every religionists and South Asianists library. . . . Enthusiastically recommended as required for undergraduate courses on the Hindu tradition. — Religious Studies Review

Biography

Diana L. Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies, and director of The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, is the editor of On Common Ground: World Religions in America, a multimedia CD-ROM (Columbia).

Amazon.com Review

Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in Shantaram, a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means “man of God’s peace,” which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence. He served two years and leaped over the wall. He was imprisoned for a string of armed robberies peformed to support his heroin addiction, which started when his marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. All of that is enough for several lifetimes, but for Greg Roberts, that’s only the beginning.

He arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. When they return to Bombay, they take up residence in a sprawling illegal slum of 25,000 people and Linbaba becomes the resident “doctor.” With a prison knowledge of first aid and whatever medicines he can cadge from doing trades with the local Mafia, he sets up a practice and is regarded as heaven-sent by these poor people who have nothing but illness, rat bites, dysentery, and anemia. He also meets Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman, with whom he falls in love. Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Karla’s connections are murky from the outset.

Roberts is not reluctant to wax poetic; in fact, some of his prose is downright embarrassing. Throughout the novel, however, all 944 pages of it, every single sentence rings true. He is a tough guy with a tender heart, one capable of what is judged criminal behavior, but a basically decent, intelligent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially anyone he knew. He is a magnet for trouble, a soldier of fortune, a picaresque hero: the rascal who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. His story is irresistible. Stay tuned for the prequel and the sequel. –Valerie Ryan

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

Paul Theroux is something of a throwback. In an era when so many novelists jump up and down with tricks, verbal antics, shock and razzle-dazzle, all the while shouting — like Baby Roo — “Look at me, look at me,” Theroux just gets on with telling a compelling story, with the smoothness of a confident professional. The Elephanta Suite: Three Novellasis his 27th work of fiction. The man knows his business.

Yet almost none of his novels or short story collections is widely known, with the partial exception of The Mosquito Coast and Half Moon Street (both made into films). People mainly think of Paul Theroux as a travel writer, the man who gave us the larky, sometimes scathing and bitterly comic bestseller The Great Railway Bazaar. Over the years since then, he’s turned out many similar books, some of them marred by his slightly sour personality. In more ways than one, he’s the Somerset Maugham of our time.

That’s meant as a compliment. Maugham was comparably disdained by critics as just an entertainer, a marketer of commercial fiction and travel journalism. Yet he wrote clearly and powerfully, and once he started telling a story, it was nearly impossible to stop turning the pages. Many of his best works were set in “the East” and described Westerners going to seed, or searching for mystical transcendence, or being tempted to crimes of passion, including murder. The debilitating heat and the lushness of the vegetation released the suppressed desires of the straitlaced, while the exotic ways of the indigenous people called into question the manners and morals of the now distant homeland. That once forbidden, even unnatural love affair — with the too young native girl or boy, or with the consul’s bored wife — might suddenly seem little more than a peccadillo, a way to pass the long, humid evenings underneath the slowly turning ceiling fan. Abroad, Maugham revealed, any of us could shuck his identity and become someone else.

The Elephanta Suite, a trio of novellas, expertly updates many of these classic themes but grounds them in the realities of modern-day India. In “Monkey Hill,” a rich American businessman and his wife spend more and more time at a luxurious spa an hour from Mumbai. There they are served by desperately poor young people who are willing to do almost anything to better their lives or earn a little money. Meanwhile in the nearby village, Muslim-Hindu conflict is gradually intensifying.

In “The Gateway of India,” a burned-out lawyer from Massachusetts, newly divorced and afraid to eat the local food or even leave his hotel room, engineers outsourcing deals for roof tiles, gaskets and power tools. One afternoon, he finally goes for a walk and experiences a revelation that will take him into sexual depravity and beyond.

In “The Elephant God,” a young woman, just out of college, immerses herself in India, eventually joining an ashram, then teaching slang and American pronunciation to the Indians working the service phones for U.S. manufacturing companies. She also starts visiting a chained-up elephant with whom she feels an increasingly strong spiritual bond. Then something horrible happens.

All three novellas are tenuously connected. Not only by their themes — Americans in India; the temptations of sex, mysticism or both; unexpected consequences — but also because the main characters all stay, if only briefly, in the Elephanta Suite of a luxurious Mumbai hotel. What’s more, the businessman of the first story is mentioned in the second, and a young woman glimpsed in the second becomes the main character of the third. That said, nothing much is done with this interlacing. It even seems a little cutesy.

But Theroux’s India isn’t cutesy at all. In “Monkey Hill,” Audie and his wife Beth are driven to their spa from the airport, passing through “the populous and chaotic India they’d been warned about, the India that made you sick and fearful and impatient.” Audie recalls the drive as “a long panning shot, the sort you’d get in a documentary with a jumping camera, the very first image a woman with no hands, begging at a stoplight just outside the airport, raising her stumps to Audie’s window (‘Don’t look, honey’), then the overloaded lopsided trucks. . . the ox carts piled high with bulging sacks sharing the road with crammed buses painted blue and red, the sight of women slapping clothes on boulders in a dirty stream (‘Laundering,’ the driver said), others threshing grain on mats. Wooden scaffolding on brick buildings that already looked like ruins, whitewashed temples, mosques with minarets like pencils, gated houses, hovels, the lean-tos and tents of squatters. . . . Every few miles huge billboards showing movie posters of bug-eyed fatties in tight clothes.”

In “The Gateway of India,” Dwight Huntsinger recognizes that in India “something within him had been liberated and released, perhaps something as simple as his fear.” “You said, ‘Poor guy, so far away in that awful place,’ never guessing that he was someone you didn’t know at all, a happy person in a distant place that allowed him to be himself — girls saying Whatever you want, sir and What you like? or the most powerful word in the language of desire, Yes.” And yet this story veers away from mere sexual exploitation: Huntsinger gradually learns that India has also released him from something even deeper, from his very identity. Readers who know Thomas M. Disch’s tour-de-force of human metamorphosis, “The Asian Shore” — about an American ensorcelled by Istanbul — will glimpse its analogue in “The Gateway of India.”

In the last story, “The Elephant God,” Alice arrives in Mumbai, a knapsack on her back, expecting to find the world of Merchant Ivory films, the world of the Indian fiction she’d read in college. She is soon disillusioned. “Where were the big fruitful families from these novels? Where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men? They seemed concocted to her now, and besieged in up-close India, all she thought of was Hieronymus Bosch, turtle-faced crones, stumpy men, deformed children.”

But she persists and discovers that India will, alas, still surprise her. By its end, “The Elephant God,” like “Monkey Hill,” gains something of the grimness of Paul Bowles’s early tales of American-Arab encounters: Close intercourse with the native people invariably leads to disaster.

It should be clear by now that Theroux isn’t likely to bring many new tourists to the subcontinent. But these novellas of hunger — physical and spiritual — only make sense in a country such as India, where such extremes meet constantly. In the ashram Alice encounters two young and pampered Indian women who grew up thinking that everyone had servants. They never fully realized that the people just outside their gated mansions, or glimpsed from their air-conditioned limousines, were starving.

Though Theroux repeats himself just a bit in the middle of “The Gateway of India,” the thought-provoking novellas of The Elephanta Suite are otherwise beautifully paced, by turns moving, sexy and disturbing. You could finish one in an evening, which means that at least three evenings this fall would be very well spent.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.