Maw is a sari-wearing, bindi-sporting, guru-loving American artist from New Mexico who even arranges a few sets for Merchant-Ivory’s The Guru; Paw is a bottle-loving, studied-in-US, landed Gujarati who mocks at the soul-searching, tie-dye-wearing, sick and homesick hippies camping at his home. As everyone from American draft dodgers to German stained-glass makers pitch their tents in the garden, Maw boasts her address is passed all along the hash trail. And then there is Rahoul who drops out of school and joins an ashram, triggering a trail of mystic associations for Narayan — from Swami Muktananda with his sunglasses and trademark orange knit cap; to the Sixteenth Karmapa who gives Maw self-multiplying pills; to the bhajan-singing ancestors, sadhus and goddesses conjured up by her grandmother’s tales. There are also cameos by Rajneesh, “the suave, English-speaking professor guru”, and Jiddu Krishnamurthy and even a half-line presence of Satya Sai Baba “who pulled Rolex watches from his Afro” along with “the ancient French mother with her scarf-wrapped forehead”.

The book reveals more than the curiosity, incomprehension and embarrassment of a young girl, who doesn’t want her hula-dancing classmates to think “we’re strange”, but who nevertheless notes it all down on stapled papers that she titles The Family. Or even the pain of a teenager watching her parents drift apart — Paw lost to his bottle, Maw to her beliefs — and her storylines foundering. Instead, from within the narrow confines of her low-roofed, whitewashed home, Narayan, now an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, carves out a scythe of Bombay. She roots her story not only in ochre-tinted memory but also in a young nation’s impatience with holy ash and holinesses, in a generation of Indians caught between a god-loving previous generation and guru-loving foreigners crowding its beaches.

... contd.