An Indian Education

When Sana is given some tattered pages that her husband has found on a trip to his childhood home in Kochi, she cannot stop reading them. They take her back to her school days, when she briefly fell in love with Windmill, a strange, introverted boy whose life revolves around the public library and his natural-history scrapbook.  

Drawn closer by a common love of books, she learns about his unusual background and comes to suspect that he nurses a dark secret. But then a tragic event upends her life and their relationship goes sour.

They meet again as classmates at Cochin University but, by then, Sana is spending much of her time with Luke and Sathi, and takes little notice of him. There are other distractions, too: helping glamour-girl Jisha deal with an unwanted pregnancy, hanging out in an abandoned warehouse with wannabe rockstars, and surviving in a volatile household with an abusive father.

As Sana’s world grows in confidence, Windmill’s begins to unravel and when he eventually goes missing, Sana, Luke and Sathi are perplexed by his family’s apparent indifference to his fate.

And then comes graduation and the search for a career. What has an Indian education taught Sana and her friends, and what have they had to work out for themselves? In this intense and moving coming-of-age romance, Sanjay Panikkar brings to life the ambitions and anxieties of India’s Generation X—and the struggles of those who don’t fit in.