Paul Theroux has been here before and has described
it memorably in The Great Railway Bazaar. On his
revisit, he began in Peshawar, up near the Khyber
Pass, full of Afghan refugees and guerrilla
warriors; journeyed through Islamabad and Lahore to
India and Simla, the Himalayan foothill town of
Kipling's stories; through New Delhi and then Agra
where the Taj Mahal stands; through the high-country
tea plantations of Darjeeling; on to Calcutta; and
finally into flooded Chittagong on the Bay of
Bengal.
Theroux describes a present day India at once as
lovely and forbidding as in The Jewel In The Crown
and A Passage To India. The Imperial Way comes to
life with Theroux's prose and Steve McCurry's
superb, prize-winning photographs. |
