Nine lives : in search of the sacred in modern India From the Dust Jacket: A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her middle class family in Calcutta and her job in a jute factory only to find unexpected love and fulfillment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes for two months of the year a temple dancer and is worshipped as an incarnate deity; then at the end of February each year he returns to prison. An illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4 000 line sacred epic that he virtually alone still knows by heart. A devadasi or temple prostitute initially resists her own initiation into sex work yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling. Nine people nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerizing and told with an almost biblical simplicity William Dalrymples first travel book in over a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the vortex of the regions rapid change. A distillation of twenty five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions Nine Lives is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales