When Aatish Taseer first visited Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window to an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally, among blossoming cotton trees and the burning corpses on the banks of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future — all the while challenging his own myths about himself, and his countries old and new.