White Bird

An accidental death launches a brother into strange, foreign adventuresThomas is a laid-back handyman until his mother asks him to go to Kathmandu and scatter the ashes of his older brother Paul. He is totally unprepared for travel, especially to exotic Nepal.He uncovers Paul’s past as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. There was a lover, Helen, who stayed behind to embrace Buddhism. Her parents are still there working with Tibetan refugees. He meets Eike, an unlikely Buddhist shaman, or healer. He dabbles in meditation and Tantric sex, flirts with Helen, and makes some big mistakes.The ashes are one issue. The other is Paul’s soul, the “white bird,” trapped in the bardo, the state between death and rebirth. Spiritual dramas cross the world, dragging Thomas’ soul into new territory.

About the Author

Ruta Sevo spent years in Calcutta and Madras (now Chennai) as a scholar, doing field work for a Ph.D. WHITE BIRD came of wishing she'd had time to go to Nepal and into the Peace Corps. Reading about thirty books satisfied a long-latent interest in Nepal and Tibetan Buddhism. A fierce trek up the Annapurna Valley topped it off. The novel is in the tradition of writers bringing the East to the West, like E.M. Forster and the Victorians Alexandra David-Neel and Madam Blavatsky. WHITE BIRD draws on Tibetan Buddhism which spread out of Tibet by Chinese force after 1959. Half a century later, Buddhism is well known in America. Sevo lives in the shadow of Washington, D.C.

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