Part One: scenes in London, Edinburgh and Delhi. Gerald Blossom, unacclaimed actor of Carribbean origin assumes the name of Ali Abdul Rahman and finds fame and a kind of fortune. Enter David Stream, international impresario and guru of cros-cultural hype. His dream is the Ramayan, the most Indian of epics, and Ali Abdul will play Ram, the greatsest of the Gods. Success attends them until fate and religious fundamentalism intervene. Part two: scenes now in London and Bombay. Mr XX, supply teacher extraordinaire and sometime Parsee historian, after many false starts, accidentally stumbles upon his fortune. It is given to him also to fulfil the dreams of others, for he too is a master of cross-cultural transference. From a bedsit in Earls Court he plans the theft of an Indian child. Using the voices of Ali, and XX to tell their own stories, this novel crosses the divide that separates the great subcontinent from the consciousness of the West.
Old myths are exploded and new ones conjured as Bombay Duck reveals an unexpected world, a seething subculture of actors and shopkeepers, politicians and farmers, gunrunners and bearded boys, linking a world of refined expectation with the noise and colour and chaos of India. This is an astonishing debut.
- ISBN10 022402678X
- ISBN13 9780224026789
- Publish Date 3 May 1990
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 10 August 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 316
- Language English