The Curry Coast
Travels Among the Khasis
Undeterred at being a poor third in the cloudy plateau in Meghalaya’s Khasi Hills, John unexpectedly digs up a wealth of nuggets—a nearby village, Mawsynram, wetter than the wettest place on earth, the competitive evangelism that’s sprouted dozens of schools and churches in the area (the Ramakrishna Mission school is a late entrant), lonely sarkari rainmen and their calculating machines, pigs being suffocated to death to produce the Khasis’ famous pork curry and the everyday problems of drying clothes and books in the relentless rain.
But despite the lingering word pictures and some convincing portraits of locals, the book suffers from an unseemly haste—like a journalist impatient to get back home and get out the story.
