Raika

In 1979, Robyn Davidson spent a week in Rajasthan in North-West India, visiting the camel fair at the village of Pushkar. There, she met and stayed with a Rajput woman, Minu, and learned much about her lonely, often unhappy life in an arranged marriage. The women meet again 11 years later.

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In 1979, Robyn Davidson spent a week in Rajasthan in North-West India, visiting the spectacular camel fair at the village of Pushkar. There, she met and stayed with a Rajput woman, Minu, and learned much about her lonely, often unhappy life in an arranged marriage. 11 years later, the two women met again, and a plan based on one they had originally concocted was a little nearer to fruition. This book has two interlocking themes: Minu's life in Purdah within the women's quarters of her husband's palace (which she left for a cottage next door to it) and the semi-nomadic life of the Rebari camel herders, which Davidson hopes to share, travelling with them deep into the desert and eventually ending up at the fair. Both ways of life are in flux: people from Minu's ruling caste are finding themselves having to sell off their land, the Rebar are forced to abandon their wanderings. The book is an exploration of three kinds of experience.