Blind Faith
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When Mia, acutely depressed by the suicide of her father, meets Karna, a young Indian guru who seems to have walked straight out of her father's painting of the Kumbh Mela, she feels compelled to follow him all the way fromLondon to India. And if marrying Vik, the suave corporate, will help her reach him, then so be it ... In India, Mia hears of Indi, Vik's accomplished, inordinately attractive mother who cannot cease raging against the limits imposed on her, by her blindness, her beauty, and her clinging son. To make sense of Indi's anguished attempts to break free, and her own journey chasing a duplicitous love, Mia must travel to the Kumbha, to the heart of her father's painting, where life, she learns, allows another perspective...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
