So how does the Buckley Ramayana measure up to the immortal standards of Ramanand Sagar? For one thing, there seems to be more skin on display here than in the pious renditions that have of late been de rigueur. Buckley reminds us that Valmiki’s verses were suffused with eroticism, though it is difficult to accept that Surpanakha resembled a kind of proto Venus Williams figure in the original Sanskrit, or that Rama was given to asking Lakshmana, “What the hell is wrong with you, man?”
No matter: we know that there is no single Ramayana, and Buckley’s episodic version retains the motive force of a story worth telling even if it occasionally reads like an airport thriller. What seems more obscure is the point of transition between these epic vignettes and the travelogue through which they are scattered. At times there is a clear segue — for instance, Buckley’s encounter with an Indian officer boasting of porn, whisky and violent death leads into an exposition of Sugriva’s hedonism — but elsewhere the switch between the bold typeface of Buckley’s Ramayana story and the more leisurely account of his travelogue is simply jarring.
What works best, perhaps, is the personal thread running through Buckley’s account. The narrator is self-deprecating about his libidinous youth, vivid in his sketches of people and places, and artlessly open in exploring the inchoate spiritual yearnings that have drawn him to India since the early 1980s. Buckley’s account rarely plods, not only because of his eye for the apt, original image, but because most experiences are worth recounting. There are, too, moments of real epiphany that make An Indian Odyssey the journey of a life and a mind.