When reporter Amrit Singh's editor at the Sentinel, a Kolkata-based newspaper, talks of sending him to "the region" (a fictionalised place that corresponds with the Northeast), he takes it as an opportunity. Resolving that the Sentinel is not what it used to be, Amrit puts aside his loyalty for the paper and on advice of his one "foreign contact", Herman the German, he decides to go to the region to find a story for a foreign publication: "Just one article, and enough to live on for two to three months." In the weeks before Amrit's departure, as he flips through old files in "the morgue", a musty room in the Sentinel office, out drops the wild card: an enigmatic photograph of a young woman taken captive by two masked men. He is going to find her and tell her story, regardless of the "adventure tourism" features his paper is looking for.

Set in the early 1990s, the novel follows Amrit through a region as shrouded in mystery as his self-assigned assignment. Travelling on rebel-infested roads, through forests and floods, with stopovers in odd towns paralysed by army curfews, he meets a strange assortment of people and finds out a few things. The woman in the photograph is Leela, who worked for Malik, the almost mythical director of the "Prosperity Project". The masked men are members of morls, an insurgent group which claims that Leela is involved in porn films and that they are punishing her as an example for all to resist the corrupt influence of Indian imperialism. A little later, Amrit realises that the Prosperity Project may not exist at all, that Leela may be in Burma with the pro-democracy activists of Aung San Suu Kyi, and that Malik may not be the hero people believe him to be. But scratching the surface proves increasingly difficult and the more Amrit chases Leela, the more she evades him. In the process, however, he has a marvellous, if menacing, adventure, filled with smugglers and counterfeiters, dreams and nightmares, wise men and oafs, all the while travelling to the edge of the Republic and to the centre of himself.

"The region" comes alive in crackling detail but suddenly it sounds familiar. Then you flip back and notice the novel begins with one of the most famous quotes from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and you realise that the plot and the main characters parallel much of the classic. And it strikes you that Surface is some sort of a tribute, a rejoinder if you will, rather than a rip-off. Maybe Amrit is Marlow and Malik is Kurtz; instead of the Congo we have Manipur and Nagaland; in exchange for the Company's brutality we have the corrupt Indian government; and in place of Belgian imperialism in Africa we have Indian imperialism in the Northeast.

Surface is beautifully imagined and elegantly written. There are startling images at unexpected corners-amateur palmist "looking rather saturnine in dark clothing" with the "rings on his fingers like satellites in orbit around him"-authentic characters with palpable idiosyncrasies and phantasmal recreation of Japanese soldiers on Burmese borders and you can't help wonder why the blueprint needed so much borrowing when the architect is so clearly extraordinary.

THE HARPERCOLLINS BOOK OF NEW INDIAN FICTION Ed by Khushwant Singh HarperCollins Price: Rs 295 Pages: 208

From Manjula Padmanabhan's futuristic piece on a world of electronic doubles to Rana Dasgupta's modern, mock-serious fairy tale, the anthology has 14 contemporary short stories..

SURVIVAL AND EMANCIPATION: NOTES FROM INDIAN WOMEN'S STRUGGLES By Brinda Karat Three Essays Collective Price: Rs 595 Pages: 284

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THE INTIMATE OTHER: LOVE DIVINE IN INDIC RELIGIONS Ed by Anna S. Singh and John Brockington Orient Longman Price: Rs 695 Pages: 425

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