A million little disclaimers
A wind-up Hanuman scoops up prescription meds on the cover of Cheeni Rao’s Chicago crack addict memoir, In Hanuman’s Hands:
When Mr. Rao’s mother feels powerless to help her drug-addict son any longer — his being kicked out of college for drug-dealing was just the beginning of the misery — she entrusts his fate to the hands of Hanuman… “My father had abandoned our ancestral temple and forgotten how to hear the Gods.” While Mr. Rao is being treated in a hospital for a drug overdose, with activated charcoal being pumped into his stomach, he has a revelation: His family is cursed by the gods for having strayed from Kashmir and from Hinduism… “In the past, when my ancestors tended the temples, the Gods spoke to them… I would need to find a God that would forgive me.” The search would take years, he says, “but I finally found one in Chicago in an alley behind a taqueria.” [WSJ]
The cover is a mashup of Eastern religion and druggie confessional, and the tale comes with the James Frey disclaimer:
The book is not “a good, old-fashioned memoir,” he warns in a note to the reader; it falls instead “between the myths we call memories and then proclaim as fact…” [WSJ]
I’m going to hope this exoticist recrudescence isn’t representative of the rest of the book. And wonder whether Rao ever faced off with Sudhir Venkatesh across the Robert Taylor projects.
Comments are closed.