Katy Gardner: Losing Gemma

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Two young women, pretty, popular Esther, and stolid, timid Gemma, set off on a back-packing adventure to India. Gemma would prefer to do it by the guidebook. Esther prefers the impulsive approach: she throws the guidebook in the air. Where it lands open is where they'll go.

Where the book opens is the off-the-tourist track Agun Mazir, where there is a shrine to a Sufi mystic who, legend has it, spontaneously combusted while meditating. History, on the other hand, cites violence between Hindus and Muslims as the real cause of his death. Whatever the truth, it is a part of India where white female travellers in search of the mystic experience called tourism are not especially welcome.

Something awful happens at Agun Mazir: Gemma is presumed dead and Esther returns to England, her previously charmed life blighted by her role in Gemma's fate.

Six years after the events, she returns to India and to Agun Mazir, drawn there to discover the truth of what really happened. Ghastly cover aside, Losing Gemma is good. It captures perfectly the sense of innocents abroad and their blunderings into ill-understood other cultures, as well as the drug-fuelled pseudo-mystical wanderings of Westerners seeking enlightenment through escapism.

Penguin

$29.95