The Rope in the Water: A Pilgrimage to India

At Kovalam beach on India's southwestern shore I plunge into the Arabian Sea, the same soft temperature as the air...Looking shoreward, I see lifeguards gesturing. Since I'm much further than I imagined, I begin a determined swim toward them...The lifeguards continue to blast and gesture, but I'm powerless against the riptide irresistibly sweeping me out to sea. Though my situation appears hopeless, I'm about to undergo the most remarkable and mysterious event of my life.... So begins The Rope in the Water, the story of Sylvia Fraser's three-month pilgrimage to India in search of something larger than myself, something deeper, something more. Travelling 12,000 kilometers across deserts and through jungles, Fraser visits sacred sites such as the twilight city of Varanasi on the Ganges, dense with the smoke of hundreds of funeral pyres; north to the glittering Golden Temple of the Sikhs; up Mount Abu where she stays with a Hindu sect called the Brahma Kumaris; south to a Buddhist