The idea of India has always been a traveller's burden. From the antique wandering sage, Orientalism's first scriptwriter, to the modern day culture tourist, every adventurer has sought the meaning of its palimpsestic identity, its patinated diversity, its swelling sorrow-and its unused wisdom. The traveller's notebook, or the Grating Indian Narrative, is an esoteric text inhabited by stereotypes and originals, and it is still flexible enough to accommodate more discoveries, like the old Russian novel. Ah, the predictable sigh of "been there, read that": pagan rites of the faithful; never-ending funeral flames on the river; photogenic poverty in the countryside; fanatics at the masjid gate; the lone rebel in a wretched country; the ghettoes and the grotesqueries of religion; the republic of hate ruled by newly awakened nationalists .... Still, India is an unfinished page in the book of revelations.

OUT OF GOD'S OVEN: TRAVELS IN A FRACTURED LAND By Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa Viking Price: Rs 450 Pages: 387

Step in Dom Moraes and companion Sarayu Srivatsa and they have an India to unravel, an India that is familiar and distant, intimate and strange. What is important here is Moraes himself, one of India's finest writers in English. Poet, memoirist, reporter, he is both sensitive and detached at the same moment. He has full control over that uncertain space between seeing and knowing. And it is that control, rarely seen in travellers with a heavy baggage of judgements, that makes Out of God's Oven so conspicuous in the marketplace of Discover India. He is here and at the same time elsewhere, he is the bystander who is occasionally pushed by the situation into the margins of the event. He won't stay there for long. He walks out, more puzzled than enlightened. The remains of such moments are the best parts of this book, part memoir, part travel, part reportage.

To get a better idea of this Dom Exceptionalism, you have Moraes introducing himself with a bit of ancestral remembrance, but no sentimental time travel. His father, Frank Moraes, legendary editor and stylist, left India in 1972 and came to London to die. "He hadn't died happily." There was a time when Moraes-lonely childhood, closed-room poetry, madness of the mother, Oxford-wanted London so badly, "to live, to write". He had to make a choice in 1980. He made the hard choice of India. His illusions died two years ago when the "grotesque reminders of the millennium" floated in the "sky of an unfamiliar London". There was no happy homecoming and happiness thereafter. Rather, India would continue to be an engaging puzzle. The young Moraes had this idea of three Indias: one was the India of the cities and he disliked it; the other was the India of the villages-"I pitied it and wanted to love it, but it puzzled me." The third India "no longer existed and perhaps never had but might have been beautiful if and when it did. But I still didn't feel I belonged to any of them."

PUZZLED TRAVELLERS: Sarayu Srivatsa (left) and Dom Moraes

The feeling hasn't changed. Moraes travels almost like an outsider in a strange country. And he has a perfect travelling partner in Srivatsa, the "dark Brahmin" who has the name of a sacred river and whose growing-up story too is one of cultural exceptionalism, intimately told in In Andamma's House. The personal story of the narrators is a status statement-essential reading to understand the story of places and people they tell in God's Oven. Familiar places. Like Gujarat 2002: "In the end the people would forget all this, as they did most unpleasant matters. It was the best way to cope with what life in India offered them." Or Bombay 1992: "I saw two men carry a large sheet of mirror across the road, three feet by six feet. Reflected in it I saw the mob. Also a beggar woman, one eye torn out, her breasts tumbling out of her scruffy saree, she carried an overgrown child in her arms, doped. Then a crow looped over the mirrored rectangle, caw, caw, caw." These and other places like Laloo Yadav's Bihar may be banal datelines from the front pages of India's recent history but in God's Oven they are stranger than yesterday's headlines. Perhaps the people are more interesting, like the Dalit poet in a blue sports car or "the General" in Bhopal.

Timothy Garton Ash, the finest chronicler of Eastern Europe 1989, has an explanation for this kind of journalism: the drama documentary where the frontier with fiction is violated, events are rearranged and real people are turned into dramatis personae. The genre of reportage as literature. Moraes and Srivatsa have done it in elegant style. These cosmopolitan liberals may want to keep a distance from the fractured India. You can't, from their despatches from the grey zones of India, so used to travellers worse and better.

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