Product Description

A coming-of-age story set in Bombay following a boy's passage to adolescence with sex and samosas, sea and shore, truant afternoons, Hindi films, and a woman's seductive daughter. The city is full of unforgettable sights and smells and includes discoveries about lies and death, meals and girls.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #222162 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 211 pages

Customer Reviews

Nice Debut
Very well written, even-toned debut which presents, in short vignettes, a tumultuous year in the life of an upper middle-class Bombay 10-year old boy, circa 1972. One of the running themes is food, another is film, although these are very vivid, they sort of pop in and out, sometimes rather forcedly. Granted, the food scenes make the mouth water, even if one isn't really sure what is being described, but the film scenes fail to elicit the same level of enchantment. Many of the short chapters are obviously semi-autobiographical, and many of the events read like personal experiences, not fiction. One minor annoyance is the decision to leave in swaths of romanized and untranslated Urdu, which isn't typographically set off in any way.