Miss New India

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In the second half of the past century, young Americans-the disillusioned, the reckless, and the hopeful-began streaming into India. They came overland in painted vans, on dust-choked, diesel-spouting buses, and on the hard benches of third-class railroad cars, wearing Indian clothes, eating Indian street food and drinking the people's water. The disaffected children of American affluence: college dropouts, draft dodgers, romantics, druggies, and common criminals; musicians, hedonists, and starry-eyed self-discoverers. These weren't the aloof and scornful British administrators or the roustabout traders of earlier centuries. You could see them at dawn or dusk, pounding out their kurtas on flat stones along the riverbank like any dhobi or housemaid. These rich Westerners-the Aussies, the Canadians, the Germans, the Finns, but especially the Americans-the ones who stayed a few months, then years-lived like poor villagers; these rich Western kids sometimes re-sorted to begging and got sick, and others died from beggars' diseases.

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