THE WESTERN GHATS

In The Death of Mr Love the narrator, Bhalu, tells the story of his idyllic childhood running wild in the ‘Ambona Hills’, giant snouts of rock covered in deciduous semi-tropical rainforest that run along India’s west coast.

I gave Bhalu many of my own childhood memories, of going looking for wild animals – there were leopards, wild boar, pythons, deer – going fishing in the many lakes, catching striped danios in the monsoon streams that would mysteriously fill with fish and crabs days after they had been nothing but dry rocky defiles.

‘The descriptions of the Western Ghats and Bombay’s Dongri area are simply exceptional’ – Outlook India

‘...what must be the definitive description of the western ghats through the eyes of a small child make this a novel that haunts one long after one has finished the last page and regretfully put it down’ – IndiaClub.com reviewer

‘...Sinha’s exquisite eye for detail : “The hills crouched like beasts around the lake, reaching rocky tongues to the water”’ – EW.com

See the page on Ambona and the monsoon

 

 

MAYO COLLEGE

Aged nine I was sent to Mayo College, a boarding school in the Rajasthan desert founded by Viceroy Lord Mayo (later speared to death in the Andamans) to drum Victorian values into the sons of India's rajas.

AJMER HOUSE, 1964-5

OAKHAM

COLLEGE HOUSE, 1967 (Click to enlarge)

T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.R.R.Tolkien, Siegfried Sassoon, Walt Whitman, Søren Kierkegaard, Robert Graves, Wallace Stevens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Virginia Woolf and e e cummings

DONGRI

The bazaars and dope dens of Dongri are chronicled in The Death of Mr Love. Dongri is a part of Bombay (Mumbai) that middle class citizens rarely visit. My friend the journalist Anil Thakraney was surprised that I knew it so well, but I spent a lot of time there in my early twenties. The portrait of Moosa’s adda is entirely accurate and some passages in the novel are based on my diaries of the time. Moosa’s hashish den was in an alley that ran off one of the wider streets. It was unknown to hippies or foreigners. Perhaps not surprisingly, I have not been able to find pictures of Dongri streets. These show Mohammed Ali Road and Chor Bazaar, which are nearby.

Best ever evocation of Bombay and Ghats
Reviewer: Fred Gomes from New York City, USA

As someone who grew up in Bombay I have to say that this is the only novel I have ever read that brings back to me the city that I knew, its sounds, smells and above all, the feel of being there. From bus rides on the 132, smells of Sassoon Dock, reminders of the great days of Hindi movies (Guru Dutt, Johnny Walker) to parts of the city like Dongri which are never written about elsewhere because only a person who knows can write: this plus a great story and characters and what must be the definitive description of the western ghats through the eyes of a small child make this a novel that haunts one long after one has finished the last page and regretfully put it down - IndiaClub.com

The descriptions of the Western Ghats and Bombay’s Dongri area are simply exceptional. But unlike many Indian English authors whose dulcet prose often hides the fact that they are but talented travel writers, Sinha tells a corking good tale: the old-fashioned type, which had plot, movement and characterisation. Sandipan Deb, Outlook India

Photos: Rediff.com

Dongri, with its night-time blur of lights and hashish smoke was unlike anything I had experienced before. The pictures above could have been taken at the Café Jam-i-Jam which was run by Bhalu’s friend Dost.

CAMBRIDGE

I grew up immersed in two very unlike cultures, with English as my mother tongue, but speaking Hindi and Urdu in the street; reading European writers but learning Sanskrit at school instead of Greek and Latin; studying the mediaeval Hindi couplets of Surdas as well as the Elizabethan rhymes of Donne; struggling with French and Anglo-Saxon for the English Tripos at Cambridge. The picture is of the court where I lived at Pembroke College.

Snowy King, below, photographed by Don McCullin, was a well known Cambridge eccentric of my day.

VENICE

I love the architecture of Carlo Scarpa and referred to it in Cybergypsies. His renovation of the Querini Stampalia is a masterpiece. Bellini's Madonna of the Trees hangs in its Art Gallery.

BHOPAL

Sunil, to whom Animal's People is dedicated, is no more. Other friends, mercifully, carry on. No words can express my admiration for their courage, their determination to struggle for justice and a life of dignity in the face of the most overwhelming odds.

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