Pallavi Aiyar followed a familiar path during her five years in China, going from English teacher to foreign correspondent. Smoke and Mirrors, her memoir of this time, is pleasant and well-written, but not brilliant. It suffers from too wide a scope, with Aiyar wanting to tell us about virtually everything she saw and heard during her years in China. Individual characters and places don’t emerge strongly, and a lot of her experiences will be familiar to anyone with even a little experience of China: students tend to converge on a single opinion in class; neighbourhoods are being rapidly transformed; people are getting coarsened by wealth.

The book is very interesting, however, when it focuses on the differences between Aiyar’s homeland, India, and China. Aiyar points to religion in India as ‘a bedrock of public life’, as opposed to the pragmatic spirituality of the Chinese. She is perhaps a little too hard on the commercialisation of Chinese religion, targeting Shaolin CEOs and fat, commercial monks, given that Indian religion is just as frequently geared towards profit, and real Chinese religious feeling tends to be more private. You get the impression that the Indians are more focused on China, seen as a competitor and model, than the Chinese are on India, which they dismiss as backwards and superstitious.

Aiyar is refreshingly honest about her own feelings: born rich, India is better; born poor, China is undoubtedly better. She draws excellent parallels between the dignity of the Chinese toilet cleaners she interviews and the degraded life of their counterparts in India. The best part of the book is her trip to Tibet, where the intensity of Tibetan feeling towards their Dharamsala compatriots is fascinatingly explored – as is the cynicism towards India among many of the Tibetan exiles there. A very readable and intriguing book for anyone interested in either country.

James Palmer