Baumgartner's Bombay

Hugo Baumgartner is a firanghi wherever he goes, too dark for Hirder's Germany, too fair for India. Escaping the Nazi regime but losing his parents to it, the wandering Jew builds a life in India but is plagued even here by war, and then partition-finally finding a home in multitudinous Bombay

We meet him as a kindly, hapless old man who spende his days doing the rounds of local teashops to gather scraps for his many cats. Part of his strange milieu is Lotte, his compatriot and playmate, an ez-cabaret artiste who has made her home in India and speaks in a strange mixture of Hindi, German and English. She is his sole confidante, but it's a crowded world he lives in-for Baumgartner seems to carry all of his past with him. Then, one day at the Café du Paris, he encounters a surly young German of the new order-a drug-crazed hippie who will change his life forever.