Reality reasserts itself, the delusions and paranoias of the backpackers's trail, and perhaps of the subcontinent itself, are disposed of.
Whether it's a happy ending or not is for the reader to decide, but it does constitute a genuine and mature resolution of the story's ingredients and effectively ties up all the material in this competent and sometimes skillful, first novel.
This is an attractive and readable book that will appeal more widely than just to the younger generation it's aimed at.
The same can't in all honesty be said about Kurt Cobain's Journals, which has also launched by Penguin with much the same market in mind.
Cobain may have been the leader of what his fans consider one of the greatest bands of all time, but these jottings don't show him to great advantage and certainly not as a wizard with the fine-line uni-ball.
Yet the publishers have seen fit to bring out the private diaries and notebooks in a sumptuous, de luxe edition. The torn and tattered pages have been religiously rendered in a loving facsimile, complete with food stains and crossings-out -- only the burn-holes from falling cannabis seeds are strangely missing.
Nirvana's music has many dedicated and serious followers, but these notebooks, here dignified as "Journals," at best tell an ambiguous story. To those for whom Cobain was a latter-day messiah they will be gold indeed. But how are the rest of us to judge them? There are song lyrics, draft letters to friends, even a recipe -- just the kind of thing more or less any teenager searching for a direction in life might pen.
In a proposed "Letter to the Editor," Cobain writes how much he wants everyone to know that he loves them, how "a very large proportion of this world's art sucks beyond description."
He concludes the letter, ominously and, as it turns out, presciently. "On second thought maybe I just tried to let the world know how much I love myself. Like a hypocrite in a hippie crypt.
"I hate myself and I want to die. Leave me alone. Love Kurt."
This anticipates his eventual suicide in a way that can only add fuel to the efforts of the anti-drug lobby. Both these books illustrate the endlessly paradoxical world of drugs -- genuine insights mixed, in ways that are hard, perhaps impossible, to disentangle, with profound delusions.
The texts tend to rebound off each other in many places, sometimes creatively but more often disturbingly.
Perhaps Penguin know what they're doing after all.
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