Nine Lives
Nine Lives
Author: William Dalrymple
Desc: From the author of The Last Mughal and In Xanadu comes a mesmerizing book that explores how traditional religions are observed in today’s India revealing ways of life that we might otherwise never have known. A middle-class woman from Calcutta finds unexpected fulfillment living as a Tantric in an isolated skull-filled cremation ground . . . A prison warder from Kerala is worshipped as an incarnate deity for two months of every year . . . A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment watching her closest friend ritually starve herself to death . . . The twenty-third in a centuries-old line of idol makers struggles to reconcile with his son’s wish to study computer engineering . . . An illiterate goatherd keeps alive in his memory an ancient 200 000-stanza sacred epic . . . A temple prostitute who resisted her own initiation into sex work pushes her daughters into the trade she nonetheless regards as a sacred calling. William Dalrymple tells these stories among others with expansive insight and a spellbinding evocation of remarkable circumstance giving us a dazzling travelogue of both place and spirit