Travelling with Tansy

This book is a cousin of the airport novel, a pastel-faced sister of the beach novel, and the separated-at-birth twin to the Rom Com &mdash starring a female lead from the Hugh Grant-patented mould of charming bumbler. The bumbler in this pulp-travelogue-meets-middle-age-Bildungsroman is Tansy Harris, a 36-year-old mother of two in danger of blundering her way into a roller coaster of chasms Alcoholism. Infidelity. Unemployment. Terminal self-loathing.

Tansy resents how domesticity has trapped her and her husband&rsquos carefree, erstwhile South Asia-traipsing selves in a bland suburban-London shell. Into this drops, deus ex machina-like, an email from an old friend, who invites her to an ashram in Pondicherry. Tansy is tantalised by the prospect between drink-induced syncope. 

In Chennai, Tansy is faced with an obstacle course of assailed-tourist tropes. She squelches through the paths of public urinators, gets pursued and daylight-robbed by rickshaw-wallahs. Her alcohol dependency also draws her to swanky bars, where snooty local lads deplore her base morals.

Relief from addiction comes in the shape of crack-of-dawn yoga sessions in the ashram. This is unmistakably Auroville recast as shady cult, with ageless, taut-bodied sylphs tooling about on bikes, many cottage industries, and residences called &ldquoTruth and Harmony or other bloody crap&rdquo. Not to mention the mysterious, charismatic &lsquoMother&rsquo its residents are in thrall to, who lulls an unwitting Tansy into murky dealings that have her on the run from the police. 

The plot is formulaic but the book is rescued from total banality by earnestly observed details the &lsquocountless good-natured cricket games&rsquo playing out by Chennai&rsquos beaches, the &lsquoagonising-looking plaits&rsquo of South Indian schoolgirls, the travellers who &lsquoprance around poor people&rsquo but stick to the company of fellow white people, and the tedious new exhibitionist breed of backpackers, exhorting one another with cries of &ldquoCome on, it&rsquoll be one for the blog&rdquo