Blind Faith
A Novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The distraught daughter of an artist who committed suicide, Mia first meets Karna in London.
Mesmerized by the charismatic young guru, she resolves to follow him to India, even if she must marry Vik, a suave corporate businessman, to do so.
Once in India, Mia is drawn to Vik's mother, Indi, an accomplished, inordinately attractive woman who rages unceasingly against her blindness, her beauty, and her clinging son. Troubled by Indi's anguish, and by her own strange journey into duplicitous love, Mia realizes she must travel even further—to the Kumb Mela religious pilgrimage—for a different perspective on her clouded and confused life.
Brilliant, bold, heartfelt, and transcendent, Blind Faith is a provocative reexamination of the human condition, of reason that binds, hate that liberates, and love that strangles.
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.
