Author: Uma Ranganathan
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 289
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143031236
Description
Looking back on your life, you see that there are times when it couldn't have been any other way. You get a sense of the invisible hand up in the sky, having silently and mysteriously laid out the path you were meant to follow in the interminable forest surrounding you.
Uma Ranganathan is a woman on a mission: a journey through space and time to find herself. Shuttling between East and West, she undergoes psychoanalysis, dabbles in consciousness-expanding substances and recalls fragments of her past in an effort to understand her own psyche.
Insights emerge from the quilt of her memory, one at a time, but a restless yearning remains: what do the most important themes in her life-friendship, love, anger, death, home, learning to live with others - really mean to her?
Amidst all the questions and doubts, friendship and home are the constants. Uma's Bombay, despite its noise and pollution, radiates warmth, bonhomie and the pleasures of familiar sights and smells. The city, the sea and the endless cast of characters-especially Sarla, Uma's cook, maid and confidante-infuse her tale with charm and humour. The darker, more searching parts of her life are told with equanimity, the maturity of one who does find peace in the end.
Deeply felt and radically unorthodox, Bombay to Eternity explores the universal questions of restless urban souls with candour and humility.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
ONE
Bombay's Child
TWO
Along the Way
THREE
Bombay Diary
FOUR
The Age of Psychoanalysis
FIVE
Adventures in Consciousness
SIX
The Road Back Home
SEVEN
Anger
EIGHT
Sarla
NINE
The Winding Path Out of the Forest
TEN
Psychedelic Sunsets
Afterword