Remember all those hippies who ran off to India in the 1970s in search of enlightenment? One of the little delights of Indira Ganesan's Inheritance is getting an Indian view of how those truth-seekers fitted into the culture and affected the people around them. A kind of mild feminism guides this unassuming novel of adolescence and self- discovery, set on an island off the Indian coast. The story meanders with its 15-year-old narrator, Sonil, whose chronic poor health has landed her a prolonged break from school at the home of her grandmother. There, time drifts, and events unfold in the flat, unquestioned perspective of youth. Sonil is fatherless, and men appear only fleetingly as silhouettes, sharply outlined but unfathomable. Her relationships with the three generations of women in the household--especially her hostility toward her aloof, eccentric mother--define the girl. But she encounters a young American man, in India to study Ayurvedic medicine, and, for a while, the chaos of Sonil's sensuality focuses on Richard, a passionate but emotionally immature hippie twice her age.

Through her short-lived relationship with him (lots of lovemaking to the music of Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Talking Heads), the wavering line of Sonil's life begins to trace a circle, leading her back to her mother and her unknown father, an American who disappeared from India before she was born. Her inheritance, it seems, is a mandala, full of repeating patterns, which, as the book ends, Sonil is beginning to draw deliberately. Ganesan's prose style has a frank simplicity that is pleasing but evanescent.