Getting There – Manjula Padmanabhan

A young woman’s quest for love, truth and weight loss. Late 1970s, Bombay. Manjula is in her twenties, struggling to earn a living as an author-illustrator. Then, a deceptively routine visit to a diet clinic and an encounter with two tall Dutch men turn her life inside out. Without much ado, she speeds off on a Westward-bound spiritual quest, which involves cheating on her boyfriend, lying to everyone she loves and cutting off all ties with her safe, respectable, bourgeois Indian upbringing. In this picaresque travel memoir, novelist, cartoonist and award-winning playwright Manjula Padmanabhan looks back on her youthful misadventures in Europe. By turns funny and fierce, Getting There will touch anyone who has ever wanted to strip off their own skin to waltz, however briefly, on the wild side.