Terin Tashi Miller

Down the Low Road: a Novel Terin Tashi Miller

In "Down The Low Road," India is the backdrop to a story of evil done by foreigners. Robert Frazier, an ex-SAS combat photographer fresh from duty in Northern Ireland, is trying to find his soul in the holy Hindu city of Benares. He meets American journalist John Colson, back in India at his parents' request to dispose of their ashes, who tries to help him. But it's Frazier who winds up helping Colson, and Colson who is left to wonder just how open to the beauty of the world a hardened veteran should be before his guard against evil gets too low. In a thrilling adventure ranging from fundamentalist Hindu and Moslem riots to loyal young Khalsa Sikh separatist supporters of an Indo-Pakistani war hero accused of killing his neighbors indiscriminately in a massacre he termed self-defense, to the hunt for the identity of an attractive Australian woman suspected of being the daughter of a wealthy pharmaceutical mogul the Indian government would like to do business with, Colson and Frazier cope with life in 1980s India, a nation on the cusp of an education and technology boom viewed as a playground, like neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan, for larger foreign powers in the centuries old Great Game of political influence and international commerce. In an eerie twist of history, the multicultural novel appears to predict events that thrust India into the limelight in the beginning of the 21st Century, as well as give a glimpse of the then-nascent fundamentalist backlash to forces of modernity pushing the world's largest Democracy to the same choice facing other countries and people-to go back in time, or forward. As Frazier quotes the SAS motto: "who dares wins."