Short Stories from India

The people you meet...

A yogi in his Himalayan retreat who was once a millionaire Bombay cloth manufacturer, forced to return to keep his sons from killing each other over the empire he left behind.

An American Buddhist, a "Defender of the Dharma," who confesses having defended his life, with death, and knows the feeling of a knife going into human flesh.

A long-haired Indian artist and philosopher who sings ecstatically the poems of the English Romantics, reads Sanskrit and German philosophers in the original, and paints miniature paintings made entirely from tiny dots that are but two-dimensional slices of the world he sees within the 'Interior of the Dot.'

And the places you go...

From the exclusive Breach Candy Club on Bombay's Arabian Sea, to a zoo in Darjeeling where an ancient Siberian Tiger lays dying...and to a remote Himalayan village where it is said that in some dim antiquity the early inhabitants built their very own Tower of Babel made of clay pots, meant to reach Heaven.

Is there really a temple complex and mountain in South India said to be underlaid by a vast network of tunnels so old their existence is clothed in legend and through which an entire population was said to disappear?