Picture this. An upper-class Englishwoman leaves her plush Kensington digs, five children and a failed marriage to make her first trip to India. She's 52, desperate for a change of scenery and India projects the reverse image of her London life. As the cliche goes, opposites attract, in her case, unimaginably so. In Delhi, she hires a tourist taxi driven by Yadav, an illiterate, even uncouth, Haryanvi. Despite the obvious differences, they are afflicted by a mysterious chemistry. Three years later, with Yadav jobless, they marry.

YADAV: A ROADSIDE LOVE STORY By Jill Lowe Penguin Price: Rs 250 Pages: 279

In that sense, the jacket blurb, "a roadside love story" is singularly apt. They live on a farm in Haryana surrounded by Yadav's copious kin, sleep on charpoys, eat squatting on a mud floor and use the fields as a toilet. There is no electricity and the nearest public telephone is 25 km away. Jill Lowe is no stressed-out westerner in search of nirvana. She is an ordinary London housewife with a mortgage to pay and children to educate.

Her attraction to Yadav is like a Mills & Boon romance but it's clearly more to do with her mental turmoil. The duo travelling together as driver and client have, by the end of the trip, formed a bond of familiarity. In Yadav's limited English, "tourist lady" becomes "yaar"; the ultimate endearment.

ROADSIDE ROMANTICS: Lowe and Yadav

The quirk of fate that brings them together is really about the pair finding a mirror image of each other. The similarities-both are ready for a life-altering experience-bind their often fractious relationship. They are alternatively husband and wife, lovers, brother and sister, friends and foes. Yadav's habits also mean that the real love of his life often becomes half a bottle of Royal Challenge.

Lowe could easily have given it up for a council flat on the Thames. Yet, she sticks by him with the flawless argument that: "Yadav? He has faults. Don't we all? Our marriage is not perfect. Whose is?" The clash of civilisations has become the clasp of civilisations. An unexpected windfall gives them enough money to move into their own rented flat in Delhi and buy an Ambassador to set themselves up as tourist guides. Freed from the feudal clutches of a joint family existence, their symbiotic relationship now seems to have the space and privacy to acquire added adhesive.

The book itself is part travelogue, part autobiography. Lowe is not a professional writer but her sparse style gives this very personal journey of discovery a life and poignancy of its own. Lowe's love story may not be unique but it is certainly a story worth telling-and reading.

AUTHORSPEAK: HARSHA DEHEJIA

The Minute Hand

In the world of aesthetic mania, there are normally two categories of people-the scholar, the plunderer of passages and the archivist of trends, admiring beauty but never thinking of possessing it; and the collector, the jealous stalker of artefacts, for whom knowledge is only a firewall against fraud and admiration only an intended prelude to acquisition. But Mumbai-born, Canada-based Harsha Dehejia is a kind of rarity in this world-a scholar who also collects, a student of Hindu religion and philosophy and a zealous collector of Indian miniatures. That is probably why he thinks his book The Flute and the Lotus: Romantic Moments in Indian Poetry and Painting (Mapin), an affectionate survey of verses and watercolours, is unique, even unprecedented. "Collectors have asked art historians to attribute meaning to their works," he says. "But then the assessment becomes far too object-centric; they never seem to describe the experience that comes from the object." And when Dehejia, who calls himself a philosopher, critiques a work, he feels he is far more passionate and holistic. The book begins with a lengthy discourse on classical aesthetics and medieval society because, to the author, any enjoyment of miniatures, in particular the cult of Radha-Krishna, can't happen without understanding the rasa theory, Vaishnavism or the non-Sanskrit sources from which Krishna arose. Then there are the miniatures themselves-from the sharp physiognomy of Kishangarh to the coarser profiles from Mewar. Dehejia, who became a doctor (an asthma specialist settled in Ottawa) before he became a serious aesthete backed with a PhD from Mumbai University, says most of the printed paintings are from his collection. But Dehejia is confused with the post-modern analysis of beauty that excludes very little from its parameters. What to make of Damien Hirst's sliced cow, pickled in formaldehyde? Any beauty in the beast? "I'm still coming to terms with this ... trying to define beauty in the modern world," he says. That, incidentally, is the topic of his next book, his fifth. Whatever the conclusion, it's unlikely he will switch to collecting Hirst sculptures.

-Anshul Avijit