Saints of Sind
Description
Saints of Sind is an exploration of the mystical Sufi shrines and hereditary saints of Pakistan's Indus valley. Half anthropological quest, it is also the real pilgrimage of an Englishman, totally at home in the languages of the subcontinent, who is determined to immerse himself in the ways of a dervish seeking the ultimate truth. Peter Mayne's sharply tuned ear catches the hidden nuance of a phrase, while his whole being takes a rambunctious delight in responding to chance encounters. He treats each human with dignity but always delights in the bizarre and the eccentric, now and then catching hold of moments of sublimity. He is an addictively inventive and brilliant writer - witty, shrewd and wise.
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Person
Peter Mayne was born in England in 1908. His father was an exotic sort of school master who specialised in the sons of the ruling princes of India and was principal of the Rajmukar College for twenty years. Later he would serve as guardian to the young Maharajah of Jaipur. When Peter Mayne had finished his education in England, he went out to Bombay at the age of twenty and worked as an assistant in a firm of merchant shippers. He was a failure as a businessman, though his father's many friendships with his ex-pupils permitted Peter easy access to Indian society. At the time of the partition of the Indian Empire he was in Kashmir, and the new Pakistan Government invited him to serve as Deputy Secretary to the Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation. After two years had passed, and the tension had eased, he resigned from Government service and moved to Morocco to write. The novel he wrote in this period was destroyed, though his journal, first published by John Murray as The Alleys of Marrakech, won critical acclaim and was translated into many languages. It was reissued by Eland in 1982 under its American title, A Year in Marrakesh. Peter Mayne later moved to Athens where he wrote The Narrow Smile, The Saints of Sind, The Private Sea and Friends in High Places, The latter was a very personal account of an extended visit to Jagut and Mussoorie, two old friends from his youth in Bombay. Peter Mayne was one of four children. He died in 1979.
