About the Book: Getting There
Late 1970s, Bombay. Manjula is in her twenties, struggling to earn a living as
an author- illustrator. Then, a deceptively routine visit to a diet clinic and
an encounter with two tall Dutch men turn her life inside out. Without much ado,
she speeds off on a Westward-bound spiritual quest, which involves cheating on
her boyfriend, lying to everyone she loves and cutting off all ties with her
safe, respectable, bourgeois Indian upbringing. In this picaresque travel
memoir, novelist, cartoonist and award-winning playwright Manjula Padmanabhan
looks back on her youthful misadventures in Europe. By turns funny and fierce,
Getting There will touch anyone