In 1969, young Kirin Narayan's older brother, Rahoul, announced that he was quitting school and leaving home to seek enlightenment with a guru. From boyhood, his restless creativity had continually surprised his family, but his departure shook up everyone - especially Kirin, who adored her high-spirited, charismatic brother.A touching, funny, and always affectionate memoir, "My Family and Other Saints" traces the reverberations of Rahoul's spiritual journey through the entire family. As their beachside Bombay home becomes a crossroads for Westerners seeking Eastern enlightenment, Kirin's sari-wearing American mother wholeheartedly embraces ashrams and gurus, adopting her son's spiritual quest as her own. Her Indian father, however, coins the term 'urug' - guru spelled backward - to mock these seekers, while young Kirin, surrounded by radiant holy men, parents drifting apart, and a motley of young, often eccentric Westerners, is left to find her own answers.Deftly recreating the turbulent emotional world of her bicultural adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, Narayan presents a large, rambunctious cast of quirky characters. Throughout, she brings to life not just a family but also a time when just about everyone, it seemed, was consumed by some sort of spiritual quest.

About the Author
Kirin Narayan is the author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels; Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon; and the novel Love, Stars, and All That. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

Reviews
"A lovely book about the author's youth in Bombay, India.... The family home becomes a magnet for truth-seekers, and Narayan is there to affectionately document all of it." - Body + Soul "Gods, gurus and eccentric relatives compete for primacy in Kirin Narayan's enchanting memoir of her childhood in Bombay." - William Grimes, New York Times"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226568218
Author Kirin Narayan
Format Paperback
Page Count 246
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 340g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 16mm * 2mm