About the Book: The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges
When Aatish Taseer first visited Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized
child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician. Nearly two decades
later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins,
wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to
tradition. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window
to an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. From
the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally, among blossoming cotton
trees and the burning corpses