Run and Hide

An author of both fiction (The Romantics) and nonfiction (Age of Anger), Windham-Campbell Prize winner Mishra offers a deeply critical portrait of what he terms the “IIT generation” of educated Indians who made their fortunes in a rapidly changing India and globalizing world and of the personal and social costs of those changes. The novel opens on a young Hindu boy named Arun who’s growing up in a rural Indian village. His parents scrimp to eventually send him to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (or IIT), hoping that he can better his financial future. At IIT, Arun meets Virendra and Assem, two young men from similar circumstances who become his lifelong friends. Following graduation, Virendra heads off to Wall Street and Assem to the Indian media while Arun remains in India, working first for Assem’s literary journal and then as a freelance translator. Virendra eventually winds up convicted of insider trading, and Arun retreats to a remote Himalayan village, where his peaceful life is upended with the arrival of a beautiful and wealthy Muslim activist named Alia. Though opposites, they strike up a relationship, but Arun is uneasy in her world, and further scandal involving Assem upends Arun again.