Three books in one. The first is a historical tapestry, as elaborate, stimulating and burnished as the the rugs, spices and precious stones that brought hordes of voyagers here. From Alberunito Vasco da Gama to Clive : some killed and plundered, others converted, some sought Nirvana, yet others simply travelled. This part is a time machine hurtling backwards through remarkable adventures and life-histories, one that readers will be loathe to get off. Did we know that a fragment of Hieun Tsang’s skull languishes in a Patna museum ? Or, that St. Thomas the Apostle may have been Jesus’s twin brother? With the deftness of a Chanderi weaver, Miller works these and other fascinating tales into a silken, flowing narrative strewn with rich motifs of dazzling insight and quirky anecdote.

 

The second is Miller’s personal story of 25 years in India, during which the country erodes his ‘cherished certainties’, and ‘tames’ his ‘intellectual arrogance’, as he learns to ‘delight in the nuance, in the exception that doesn’t prove the rule’. Many resident foreigners have written on India, but few have displayed Miller’s superlative, almost ‘karmic’, intuition when dealing with India’s eccentricities and complexities.

 

The third part charts an almost independent course in the footnotes: capricious, irresistible tangents relevant to a character, if not always to the storyline on a given page.

 

Chapters 13-15 — the last — make the reader feel like a very high Lucy in a turbulent sky. Racing possibly against a deadline or, suffering from the absurdly modest assumption that nobody would buy a second or third Sam Miller, the author tears and darts from The Beatles to Sholay, from the Jaipur Lit Fest to EM Forster, from Slumdog Millionaire to London restaurants. This pastiche of uncut diamonds leaves the reader begging the superlative teller of tales to ease off the gas pedal and write several sequels.

 

Given the sheer volume of material writers process, one of the most important jobs in journalism and publishing is that of the copy editor. Any (especially Indian) fact-checker reading that Vince Walker, the American journalist in Attenborough’s Gandhi was a ‘fabrication’, would — at least — hit the ‘Search’ key on Google. United Press journalist Webb Miller, upon whom Walker’s character is loosely based, certainly did not spend as much time with the Mahatma as the latter does in the movie. But Miller did cover the Salt March and was even thanked by Gandhi for helping ‘make India’s Independence’ through his reportage.

 

That the upper arm’s bone (in a fascinating passage on St Thomas’ relics) is not the ulna but the humerus (the radius and the ulna are twin bones in the forearm), too, is Human Anatomy 101.

 

Other minor errors raised my writers’ hackles (….The first Jews came to India earlier than ‘them’ instead of ‘they’, the arrival of the elephant Hanna ‘in’ — instead of ‘at’ or ‘on’ — the outskirts of Rome were some of the allergens). But Sam Miller is the rare kind of resident ‘angrez’ whose British sense of humour is intact enough to not mind such nit-picking. It’s not every day that you pick up a book that ends with an apology for inadvertent glitches and — a trick: ‘There is one ‘error’ I have deliberately inserted as a little joke,’ he writes in ‘Apologies and Acknowledgments’. ‘If you are the first to spot it….you will be rewarded appropriately.’

 

I am still searching hard.


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