Blind Faith

January 7, 2008
In the second novel from Ghose (The Gin Drinkers
), Mia Bhagat is a 28-year-old London-based Bengali reeling from the inexplicable suicide of her “Marxist-turned-Mystic” father. Her job as a TV reporter introduces her to Karna, an initiate of the conservative, utopian Purification Journey Brotherhood (men should “fight the female ego”) who’s also the spitting image of a figure from her late father’s painting of the Kumbh Mela, or Ganga River Festival of the Pitcher. Mia falls for him hard, but her mother arranges a marriage to a kind cosmetics entrepreneur named Vik Ray, with whom Mia moves to New Delhi. There, she enters the whirlwind of her husband’s extravagant parties and secretly waits for Karna. A subplot follows the character arc of Vik’s brilliant, beautiful and blind mother, Indi, from her childhood in Delhi to retirement in Goa. Ghose evokes the Indian settings with a wonderful tactility, and she hones in cuttingly on the sparring desires for love, independence and transcendence. Though the fractured plot’s threads weave together too neatly, Ghose, who is an anchor on CNN’s Indian affiliate, offers convincing meditations on mysticism vs. rationality and commercial wealth vs. spiritual poverty as they play out for her conflicted lead.

February 1, 2008
Mia is a young British news journalist of Indian heritage. Her emotional state afterher fatherssuicide pushes her into a hastily arranged marriage with Vik, a handsome and successful Indian businessman. Vik understands her position more than she realizes and gallantly takes on his role of loving husband. At the same time, Mia forges a new bond with Karna, an earnest Indian guru who bears a striking resemblance to a subject from one of her fathers paintings. Her strong feelings for Karna compromise her new relationship with Vik, especially when Karna urges her to join him at the Maha Kumbha Mela, the largest and most sacred of Hindu pilgrimages. As Mia finds herself inexorably drawn to Karna, she contemplates her future with Vik. Her ultimate decision is defined by her relocation to India, where the contrasts of light and dark, ancient and modern, and Occident and Orient create an unavoidable collision between the star-crossed lovers. Liberally blurring lines between continents and generations, Blind Faith is a beautiful and dizzying take on India in glorious Technicolor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)