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Book Name:Three Quarters of a Footprint: Travels in South India Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 195 ISBN: ISBN 1 86197 196 6 Year:2000 Pages:348

An Innocent Abroad

Ever since the English discovered their sea legs, they've been travelling. Perhaps it was a reaction to their cramped island quarters. Or perhaps it was simply because, as a great English traveller once wrote, "Man was made to wander. Wandering cures depression." Joe Roberts was born in Bath, where he now lives with his wife and son. For seven years he lived in America, working as a baker in Manhattan and in Austin, Texas. Returning to England in 1984, he carried on cooking in restaurants. He also started writing in1990, and decided to support himself by making pasta. Since then, Joe Roberts has written a series of books on his wanderings in India. Abdul's Taxi to Kalighat was the most recent but he kicked it off with Three-Quarters of a Footprint in India. This debut travel book was greeted on its first publication in 1994 by acclaim from a remarkable group of readers that happened to include travellers like Norman Lewis, Eric Newby, Geoffrey Moorhouse, Christopher Hope, Eric Newby, Ranulph Fiennes, Bel Mooney - and the Indian press. Geoffrey Moorhouse called the book, "A marvellous evocation of South India"

Joe Roberts spent five months in Bangalore. His hostess Mrs Trivedi ran her household while her husband Major Trivedi, a contemplative semi-invalid, predicted change and decay with the persistence of Poe's Raven. Atul, their eighteen year-old son, daydreamed of Hollywood stardom and listened to outdated music on his two in one. Joe Roberts used Bangalore as a base from which to explore the length and breadth of South India. Major Trivedi warned him in a typically gloomy fit that 'nothing is as fixed as you think' As a result of the people he met, he soon lost any preconceptions he might have had. In French Pondicherry he found Rita, a melancholy divorcee banished to an ashram. He saw the great temple at Madurai and the sacred island of Rameshwaran. He watched the snakeboat races at Arunmula, stayed with Syrian Christians in Cochin and was offered heroin in the Jewish cemetery there.

What most sensible Indians would say on reading book is: "What a lot of strange characters Joe Roberts meets!" There is a general theory prevalent that the Indians who haunt English or foreign travellers are a group of eccentrics and con artists, out to make a quick pound or dollar. Though it is surprising how many Indians do choose to flaunt European or American acquaintances as a sign of intellectual superiority. And for quite a few Indian women, a foreign husband is a sign that they've 'arrived', that they have the freedom to roam the world in the company of their spouse and so display how cosmopolitan and sophisticated they are.

You can find these Indians haunting British Council do's in the evenings, or making their presence felt in the USIS. In fact, one group in Calcutta even attempted to set up a body that would relive the American spirit by discussing what was happening in America in dinner get-togethers at members' house, or preparing Indian students for study in America. The group ultimately fell apart. Some Indians, in fact, even sport American or pseudo-English accents and talk about shopping at Macy's or Harrods.

Of course, most of them do have relatives in England and America and all of them are riveted to the Star TV network, so everyone knows what is 'in' in America and abroad. Joe Robert's seems to have had the misfortune of meeting several of these Indians who are brown on the outside and white on outside. In India they are known as Desi Born Confused Americans - as opposed to the American Born Confused Desis that include writers like Jhumpa Lahiri

Joe Roberts takes these people entirely at their face value. Not that he has much option, since they are the people he is staying with. To travel to India, he throws up his job and breaks up with his girlfriend. His journey begins not in Calcutta, Bombay, or Delhi, but down south from Bangalore, which is an odd place to start. Though down south, after Arundhuti Ray, is the fashionable place to be.

Roberts' is the account of an innocent abroad. A man who looks at the exoticism that is India and absorbs it all with the eye of a kindly hawk.

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