Little Kingdoms

'I pull up my inexpertly tied dhoti with one hand, fight back a yawn a break into a running walk to the rhythm of furiously flapping cloth... how nice it is to feel your balls catch the air in a dhoti... So much nicer than a resisting, restraining colonial trouser crotch.' Struck by a fatal illness, Dildo Iyengar, a Western-educated Brahmin, give it all up and embarks on a journey across India in search of his roots, and enlightenment-preferably through union with the ultimate feminine energy. As he wanders footloose from Kinnaur in the high Himalaya to Tirupathi in the south, a host of eccentric characters come gloriously alive: erotic travelling companions, antique smuggling dons, stoned sadhu babas, tribal headmen, ageing hippies, and an ageless, omniscient ghost. Alive with wit and iconoclastic insight, Little Kingdoms is a pleasantly self-deprecating account of a modern man's search for himself and his God in an ancient land.