Getting There

Author: Manjula Padmanabhan
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 330
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0330480383

Description

With a playwright's playful ear for dialogue and incisive wit, it is a tale, pat fiction, part truth, that will touch any young woman who has ever wondered where and when she might begin to fit in.

It is the last 1970s and Manjula Padmanabhan is in her mid-twenties, trying to find her way in the world. Life in Bombay is proving tricky: there are the visits to Dr Prasad's diet clinic, where the 'body beautiful' comes in the form of photographs of gloomy nudes; lunch at her brother's house, where snacks are thrown across the room and caught by the dog; and there are the intriguing Dutch visitors..

As relationships become even more chaotic, Manjula begins to think that the West is really her spiritual home. She sets off with her boyfriend Prashant to the suburbs of New York, where the American dream appears on the plate: daytime TV, mountains of food and visits to the New York City Morgue. But this is just the beginning of the author's journey as she travels to Europe where, it seems, her quest for contentment might end.