Tarun Tejpal

Tarun Tejpal is a journalist and publisher. He has been an editor with the India Today and The Indian Express groups, and the managing editor of Outlook magazine. He has also written for several international publications, including The Paris Review and The Guardian.

In 2000, he started Tehelka.com a net magazine that has been in the news for its sting operations.

Works

• The Alchemy of Desire {2005}

The Alchemy of Desire

The Alchemy of Desire is an ambitious work, thematically and structurally. It has several different interleaved strands: the role of sexual attraction in love, the struggles of the emerging writer, the problems of India emerging from traditionalism to modernity.

The narrator and his wife Fizz are besotted with each other. The couple endures genteel but joyful poverty until an unexpected inheritance allows them to purchase a country home in the Himalayas. This house was built by an American adventuress, Catherine, whose journals detail a series of intense relationships with various Indian men, including a prince. The narrator cannot pull himself away from the journals and the woman whose spirit seems to haunt him, and is as a result pulled away from his wife for the first time.

Source: Peter Gordon in The Asian Review of Books