Twelve Days

Начало книги

For as long as he could remember, Vikosh Jain had wanted to see India. His family’s homeland for a hundred generations. The world’s largest democracy. The birthplace of his religion.

While his friends moved out after college, he lived at home, paying off his loans and saving money for what he knew would be an epic adventure. The trip became an obsession. He mapped every train ride across the subcontinent, Mumbai to Delhi, Kashmir to Madras. Finally, when he’d saved the twelve thousand dollars he’d budgeted for a ten-week trip, he bought his ticket.

What a fool he’d been.

After a month, he couldn’t wait to get home. He was sick of India. Sick with India, too. He’d stayed away from street food and drank only bottled water. Even so, he found himself glued to a toilet a week after he arrived. The cheekier travel websites called what had happened to him “the Delhi diet.” It sounded like a joke, but by the time the doxycycline kicked in, he’d lost ten pounds. He could hardly walk a flight of stairs. His skin let him pass for local, but his gut was suburban New Jersey through and through.

Читать дальше →