Set on a university campus near Paris where Shanti embarks on a voyage of self-discovery, this finely written novel brings alive life in a foreign university as seen through the eyes of an Indian student. Friendship, love and guilt, are explored through vividly etched, complex characters that inhabit Shanti’s world. Shanti’s non-European friends in this Francophone university think of her as someone different from the ‘others’, a term reserved for the Europeans by the foreign students, most of whom are paranoid about race distinctions.
Marie Elena, a sociologist with prophetic judgments about people and South Americans Carlos and Aline are Shanti’s closest friends and pivotal is Shanti’s extremely close relationship with the strange Dominique, the only person to whom she confesses her fascination for the cold and married Etienne.