Dimensions
152 x 233 x 18mm
This novel begins in 1990 in small-town southern India. Vijay is desperate to escape to the big city following his graduation from college. His big chance arrives unexpectedly when the family servant Raju runs away to join a Hindu fundamentalist cult. Encouraged to write an article about the increasing power of the fundamentalists, Vijay eventually gets a job in a small Bombay monthly publication, The Indian Secularist. When Bombay is thrown into a series of increasingly violent riots in which hordes of extremists search out and systematically murder Muslims, Vijay wants to get to the heart of the story but almost loses his life in the process. To recuperate, he is sent on a working holiday to a tea estate in the Nilgiris mountains, near a spectacular Christian shrine that is the object of religious wrangling. Vijay is to investigate but not get involved, however he finds out that there is more to the story of the shrine than he had bargained for.
