The chapter on gigolos is interesting although a couple of anecdotes are all we get from it. Of course Delhi got a chapter to itself with its dubious distinction for sexual harassment, followed by a treatise on the ‘Good Indian Girl’, a fairly pointless chapter where strangely, she doesn’t mention the names of the authors of the book The Bad Indian Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girls, even though she quotes from it. The section on the north would be incomplete without the Khajuraho temples of course, and she includes Shimla, the seat of the licentious Raj. Incongruous though it is to the Indian eye, for the sake of convenience, she has chosen to include Bombay in the section on South, Gujarat in the North and Varanasi in the East. The book is divided into North1, North 2, East and South. It is probably daunting to examine something that has been dissected many a time before and yet she climbs that bandwagon with confidence. Sally Howard is not the first writer to be fascinated by the sexual paradox that is India, where the Khajuraho and Kama Sutra proudly bare all, even while condoms are sold in brown paper packets, nor is she likely to be the last. It’s always a little annoying to be defined as the country of the Taj and the Kama Sutra, and yet, there seems no way around it.
