Holy Cow! by Sarah MacDonald (Random House) ~Janet Brown

Few things reveal how much social behavior has changed over time like travel literature written by Westerners in the distant past. And nothing shows the accelerated pace of modern time like Holy Cow!, published twenty-four years ago, with observations that can make readers cringe in 2026.

To be fair, Sarah MacDonald was only 21 when she first encountered India and her graphic, nauseating descriptions were undoubtedly a defence mechanism against severe culture shock. She loathes the place and when an itinerant fortuneteller tells her she will come back to the country for love, she knows she's been bilked.

Eleven years later, she returns, in love with a foreign correspondent who's based in New Delhi. Leaving a job she adores for a country she hates seems a dubious proposition. Not even domestic bliss with her boyfriend distracts her from noticing everything that set her teeth on edge and her stomach into turmoil during her first visit. But her boyfriend's journalism instincts for a good story make him take Sarah to yet another soothsayer, one who tells her "You will search India's land of gods and find faith."

What she finds is a full-blown case of double pneumonia, bestowed upon her by New Delhi's thick and toxic smog. Suddenly Sarah's engulfed in total immersion, flat on her back in a "private hospital with first-world facilities" that's bordered by a Hindu temple, a "wasteland full of rubbish and cows," and a slum. Her boyfriend stays with her for the week she's there because popular belief has it that women in Indian hospitals are often raped. When she's finally released she's "in a different body…gray, scrawny, and sickly...without a job or a focus." She realizes she has a choice: "live out an Asian Jane Austen existence"  or "find peace of mind, body, and soul."

Sarah sets off with her usual snark, calling her Vipassana meditation retreat "a brain enema." After making it through what she terms “a TV episode of Survivor Spiritualists,” going without speaking, reading, or writing for ten days, she returns to the world with a feeling of greater acceptance until she discovers her hair’s falling out. Advice from a gang of Sikh street toughs sends her away from New Delhi, alone, on her way to the Golden Temple of Amritsar, and beyond.

By now it becomes clear to anyone who's read this far that Sarah's own journalism instincts have kicked in, courtesy of her latest fortune-telling experience. She's bound and determined to search for, even if she fails to find, faith within "India's spiritual supermarket." 

And does she ever, rocketing from the center of Sikhism in Amritsar to exploring Islam in the war-torn paradise of Kashmir. On her honeymoon, she forays into the "biggest spiritual festival on earth," a time when Hindus come from all over India to bathe in the Ganges and holy men who have turned their backs on the world unite in "a devotional disco alley" where dancing and ganja smoking breed a kind of "bamboo Las Vegas." Journeying to Dharamsala, she hears the Dalai Lama giggle and explain Tibetan Buddhism. Then she meets the woman who once was Diane Perry and now is famous as Tenzin Palmo, founder of a nunnery where women are given an education that's both practical and spiritual.

As Sarah wanders, her observations move from sarcasm and disgust into an appreciation for an ancient culture, until her quest is derailed by 9/11 and the geopolitical horrors of a new century. Although Holy Cow! is a survey course, the progression of a smart-aleck into an informed and respectful investigator is entertaining and illuminating, showing how the world, as well as one person, has changed.