An Indian Attachment tells the story of a love affair between Sarah, a young British woman of adventurous spirit, and Jungli, an impoverished, opium-addicted Sikh temple servant. But this is not just a cross-cultural love story. With totally convincing authority, it immerses the reader in the realities of rural India like no other book, made vivid by a meticulous examination of landscape and a description of the realities of desperate poverty, first in a remote Punjabi village in 1979 and afterwards in a fly-blown, rat- and snake-infested, ramshackle community which grew up around an authoritarian holy man.