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From the acclaimed author of Arresting God in Kathmandu comes this engrossing story of love and loss in contemporary Nepal. The Guru of Love is a moving and important story- important for what it illuminates about the human need to love as well as lust, and for the light it shines on the political situation in Nepal and elsewhere.
Ramchandra is a math teacher earning a low wage and living in a small apartment in Kathmandu with his wife and two children. Moon-lighting as a tutor, he engages in an illicit affair with one of his tutees, Malati, a beautiful, impoverished young women who is also a new mother. She provides for him what his wife, who comes from a priviledge background, does not: desire, mystery, and the beauty of a simpler life.
Not surprisingly, the affair soon upends Ramchandra's family and he learns the he knows far less about his wife - and about himself then he thought.
Complicating matters is Kathmandu itself, a small city bursting with the conflicts of modernization, a static government, and a changing population. Just as Kathmandu must contain its growing needs, so must Ramchandra learn to accommodate both tradition and his very modern desires.
Absolutely absorbing yet deceptively simple, this novel brims with psychological acuity and a rich sense of the connection between spirituality and sensuality. It also cements Upadhyay's emerging status as of Nepal's most exciting new writers.