This book provided great atmospherics of Bombay, but it could have used a good editor to trim out a couple of hundred pages. A lot of thought-provoking writing on the nature of fate and good and evil, put in the context of an Australian prison escapee finding a home amid the Bombay underworld. It was usually interesting - I just suffered a lot from carrying the extra pages with me on the subway. Did he really need to go off to war? I actually look forward to the movie adaptation - if done well, a judicious establishing shot could take care of several dozen pages of this book's establishing writing.