ALL SAINTS146; DAYS

Kirin Narayan does it, standing on the wet edge of a 1970s Juhu beach, as her past washes up at her feet, like old cans, cowries and driftwood. These are the very things with which Narayan8217;s precociously spiritual elder brother Rahoul crafts his 8220;Rahoul-beings8221;, pasting on it, as a final flourish, the enormous eyes that he buys from the God8217;s Eyes Shop at the Bhuleshwar temple bazaar of central Bombay. The eyes, with all their metaphorical significance, remain throughout the book as do gods, saints and Rahoul 8212; until he goes blind and, watched by another 8220;Rahoul being8221; in New Mexico, dies of 8220;a mysterious illness spreading among gay men8221;, AIDS. But we are getting ahead of the story.

Narayan8217;s memoir My Family and Other Saints is about a house on the crossroads of culture. The title is a play on Gerald Durrell8217;s classic My Family and Other Animals on his Corfu days that Narayan read as a 10-year-old, following which she threatened her Maw that she would write something similar about her own bizarre home.

Maw is a sari-wearing, bindi-sporting, guru-loving American artist from New Mexico who even arranges a few sets for Merchant-Ivory8217;s The Guru; Paw is a bottle-loving, studied-in-US, landed Gujarati who mocks at the soul-searching, tie-dye-wearing, sick and homesick hippies camping at his home. As everyone from American draft dodgers to German stained-glass makers pitch their tents in the garden, Maw boasts her address is passed all along the hash trail. And then there is Rahoul who drops out of school and joins an ashram, triggering a trail of mystic associations for Narayan 8212; from Swami Muktananda with his sunglasses and trademark orange knit cap; to the Sixteenth Karmapa who gives Maw self-multiplying pills; to the bhajan-singing ancestors, sadhus and goddesses conjured up by her grandmother8217;s tales. There are also cameos by Rajneesh, 8220;the suave, English-speaking professor guru8221;, and Jiddu Krishnamurthy and even a half-line presence of Satya Sai Baba 8220;who pulled Rolex watches from his Afro8221; along with 8220;the ancient French mother with her scarf-wrapped forehead8221;.

The book reveals more than the curiosity, incomprehension and embarrassment of a young girl, who doesn8217;t want her hula-dancing classmates to think 8220;we8217;re strange8221;, but who nevertheless notes it all down on stapled papers that she titles The Family. Or even the pain of a teenager watching her parents drift apart 8212; Paw lost to his bottle, Maw to her beliefs 8212; and her storylines foundering. Instead, from within the narrow confines of her low-roofed, whitewashed home, Narayan, now an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, carves out a scythe of Bombay. She roots her story not only in ochre-tinted memory but also in a young nation8217;s impatience with holy ash and holinesses, in a generation of Indians caught between a god-loving previous generation and guru-loving foreigners crowding its beaches.

For all her insistence as a child, Narayan does not try to imitate Durrell8217;s comic exaggeration of his family 8212; although they both star as 10-year-olds in their respective menagerie of memories. Hers is a subdued, watchful tone, which borders on derision only when it comes to some of the antics of the 8220;urug8221;, the mirror word of guru, Paw8217;s mocking term for western guru-seekers. And the Bombaywallahs 8212; including Prithviraj Kapoor; Mummy-la, Kabir Bedi8217;s mother who becomes a Tibetan nun; and Mulk Raj Anand 8212; pass by with as little importance as a child would give them. However, Narayan8217;s reconstruction of her reminiscences sometimes lags; her insistence on keeping Rahoul as the thread of the tale does not succeed and often Rahoul8217;s presence towards the end of chapters looks laboured. And Narayan is better reporting than introspecting in long stretches. Yet if you want to see the West and the East meet in Bombay 30 years ago, there8217;s no better place than Narayan8217;s home at 13 Janaki Kutir, Juhu.