3 Review(s)

He was waiting behind the barrier at the airport, smiling and waving. I wondered how I could ever have doubted the rightness of coming back.' Born into upper-class English society, Jill Lowe made her first trip to India for all the wrong reasons. After seventeen years of marriage and five children, her husband had gone bankrupt with her inheritance, and her comfortable London existence had come to a bitter end. At the age of fifty-two she needed to change her scenery, prove her mettle. After touring south India with a hilariously unsuitable travel companion, Jill hired her own driver in Delhi, got into his taxi and, three years later, married him. Yadav is a widower from a Haryana farm. He and his copious kin eat off a mud floor, sleep on charpoys and relieve themselves in the fields. The nearest phone booth is twenty-five kilometres away. How Jill and Yadav blend their lives is an amazing story of affinity, commitment and resilience. Their families accept their relationship with open arms, but not everyone else does. In this gritty yet graceful memoir of a thoroughly unconventional romance, Jill is touchingly honest about her loneliness in Britain, her adventures on the road, her stop-and-start wedding plans and the long, gratifying process of learning to live an Indian life.