This tale of love, friendship, violence, corruption and hardship shook me. The lives of Ajay, a poor boy sold into service by his father, Sunny, born into a criminal family and Neda, a journalist who falls in love with the wrong man, paint a colourful picture of the complex, hard society that is India.
Ajay travels from Delhi to Lucknow by train and from Lucknow he takes another train to Gorakhpur and from there he takes a local bus. It all comes back to him now. All that dust and all that smoke, the smell of burning plastic in all those towns, the buffalo herds and fields of mustard and corn and wheat and cane, all that engine oil dripping into the ground, mixed with the garbage and rotting vegetables. And the phantoms too. Arms cut off, throats slit, heads caved in. Corpses thrown into wells. The feces of men. Men on fire. But he has risen. Transcended.
