I broke out of prison in Melbourne and somehow scrounged my way to India with a lot of money and a filched New Zealand passport. I can't do the accent. I'm wonderful. I think India is wonderful, so therefore India must be wonderful. I'm even more wonderful because i went and learned all the languages of the people of India. The people are wonderful. They are poor but they are happy. Maybe they are happy because they poor. Except the rich ones. But they are happy as well. Probably because they are rich.
I have a series of wacky adventures in Bombay, mostly in or around a slum i've chosen to live in for a while. Previous life experience in first aid, martial arts and poetry allow me to bring my own brand of wonderfulness to each situation. I also hang around sometimes with a gang of foreigners and snooty locals at a name-drop bar where we get drunk and i make up conversations about philosophy to make them sound as interesting as i am. I'm getting paid by the page.
I introduce a large number of supporting characters, almost all of whom are men, and all of whom i will either do illegal business with, beat up, or come to love, generally after some incident involving a gun, a knife, a drug addiction or a kidney-meltingly dull discussion about good and evil. All this talk of loving men might make you think i'm gay, but i'm not, and i emphasise this by spending the first half of the book wearing down this Swiss chick who eventually agrees to shag me. I spend the second half of the book trying to get her to shag me again. She turns out to be have been treacherous from the start, but that's about all you can expect form the Swiss. Most of the supporting characters die. A couple come back from the dead. Some even survive the book, due in no small part to not having had to read it.
I am mostly renowned for setting up a dodgy health clinic in the slum, where i stopped a fire and cured cholera. In reality i spent more time beating people up and making shed loads of money for a mafia boss. He then went a bit doolally and took us all to jihad with the Afghans, fighting a lifelong battle against their sworn enemies, the Afghans. Like Catherine the Great however, horses brought about his end, but it's okay, because he betrayed me like the father he never was, and i'm still wonderful because i forgave him. I made it back to Bombay to continue making shed loads of cash for somebody else who isn't likely to try to recruit me into a private militia on hire to whichever Islamist group feels the gubment isn't representing them properly and the best way to show them is to shoot - rather than vote - them out. Inexplicably, i then agree to go on a jihad to Sri Lanka. Shooting people in Afghanistan, or indeed anywhere, is fine as long as you are on the side bankrolled by the Americans.
Along the way i pontificate incessantly about What Is Love, to the point where readers will wish they never ever find out. Bombay is very smelly, heroin is great when you are on it, and not so great when you aren't, Pakistan is resolutely no fun, and muslims drink a lot of chai.