"Pankaj Mishra transforms a visceral, intimate story of one man's
humble origins into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a society bedazzled by
power and wealth--what it means on a human level, and what it costs.
Run and Hide is a spectacular, illuminating work of fiction."
--Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach
Growing up in a small railway town, Arun always dreamed of escape. His
acceptance to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, enabled
through great sacrifice by his low-caste parents, is seemingly his
golden ticket out of a life plagued by everyday cruelties and
deprivations.
At the predominantly male campus, he meets two students from similar
backgrounds. Unlike Arun--scarred by his childhood, and an uneasy
interloper among go-getters--they possess the sheer will and confidence
to break through merciless social barriers. The alumni of IIT eventually
go on to become the financial wizards of their generation, working hard
and playing hard from East Hampton to Tuscany--the beneficiaries of
unprecedented financial and sexual freedom. But while his friends play
out Gatsby-style fantasies, Arun fails to leverage his elite education
for social capital. He decides to pursue the writerly life, retreating
to a small village in the Himalayas with his aging mother.
Arun's modest idyll is one day disrupted by the arrival of a young woman
named Alia, who is writing an exposé of his former classmates. Alia,
beautiful and sophisticated, draws Arun back to the prospering world
where he must be someone else if he is to belong. When he is implicated
in a terrible act of violence committed by his closest friend from IIT,
Arun will have to reckon with the person he has become.
Run and Hide is Pankaj Mishra's powerful story of achieving material
progress at great moral and emotional cost. It is also the story of a
changing country and global order, and the inequities of class and
gender that map onto our most intimate relationships.
