MANIKARNAKA GHAT, BENARES
“Down the Low Road” is available for purchase on Amazon.com and CreateSpace.com and at Barnes & Noble.
◊ Buy your copy on CreateSpace.com
◊ Buy your copy on Amazon.com
◊ Buy your copy on Barnesandnoble.com
◊ Terin Miller Amazon Author page
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“From Where the Rivers Come” is available for purchase on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and CreateSpace.com.
◊ Buy your copy on CreateSpace.com
◊ Buy your copy on Barnesandnoble.com
◊ Buy your copy on Amazon.com
◊ Terin Miller Amazon Author page
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The last time I was in India, I'd lost my literary agent and friend, Ray Puechner, divorced, and was dead set on revisiting old friends and reliving old times, even though those times and many of those friends had gone the way of my agent.
India had changed, as had I. Yet, Varanasi as always became my touchstone.
I went back to do some stories for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, to try for some sort of reliving of my youth, and, I thought, to truly trim fat I'd built up on my brain during the intervening years.
The trip succeeded in every way. I met new friends who reminded me of old friends; I saw my beloved Hindi teacher, Virendra Singh, and finally went into Ma Ganga, to absolve myself of any sins I may have committed along the way as a police and crime reporter and determined writer.
And on the Ganga-Yamuna, I made a new friend, a young Scot reading about Art History.
My deceased agent's wife, Barb, suggested at the time I try writing a mystery, as I was by then an experienced police reporter and knew a few things about the genre.
I tried. But I discovered, on that trip, the key to mysteries is the ending. And everyone's ending is ultimately the same. It's hard to have a mystery series if your main character really gets jumped or beat up or shot at. In other words, if the character lives in the real world.
I'd also had the brother-in-law of my then main editor, a police officer, killed while working undercover in a drug and gambling raid by his fellow officers on the Dallas Police Department.
I only knew the one place, and the one way--The Low Road is the hard road. And I'd seen it up close and personal, as had the great Scot poet, Robert "Bobby" Burns, who wrote not only of the two ways, but of the parting of ways, and the need to set things right.
I've known cops, and soldiers, and other tough and hard and well trained men. Often, they don't really like what they happen to be good at doing. But they are good at what they do, so they keep doing it. And we'd be unable to live our lives, follow our dreams, or kiss our kids goodnight without them.
"Who Dares, Wins," translates Burns' motto in his "Battle of Banochburn": "Welcome to yer gory beds, or to Victory!"
~ Terin Tashi Miller
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“From Where the Rivers Come” has been a labor of love.
From its origins until now, I have done many things, seen many things, reported on many things, and been many places. But always, always, this story has pushed its way forward.
Part of that I attribute to the fact India, like me, has been through much change since I first saw it as a toddler. But no matter where I go, how I change, or what I do, Benares ~ now called officially Varanasi, though it has many other names ~ remains for me the nation’s heart, the Ganges River its main artery, and the people its life blood.
What flows from Benares spreads throughout the nation, and what affects the nation winds up affecting Benarsis.
To me, this book is a tragedy ~ like life. The tragedy of life takes many forms but ultimately, for westerners, the fact it ends is the reason it is so tragic.
But that thinking belies our ultimate prejudice: the belief that what we believe, what we think we know of our world, is the correct answer.
The book opens quoting Ecclesiastes for a host of reasons, not least of which is the fact that my parents often argued “civilization” didn't originate in the Judeo-Christian biased fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, but along the Indus River valley.
It also quotes T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The question he posed in his stanzas on what the thunder said could be said to be the true origins of this novel: “What have we given?”
~ Terin Tashi Miller
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 TERIN TASHI MILLER · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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