Sean G. Ahearn arrives in New Delhi in the dead of night having departed the hyper-organized and sanitized confines of a life of teaching and Zen meditation behind the walls of a Japanese monastery.

Separated from his friends, lost, endangered, and perplexed, he dives into a freestyle adventure, relishing the history, culture, people, and everyday experiences that the vast Indian subcontinent offers.

He sets out on an epic odyssey to reunite with his friends and find the Dalai Lama in the foothills of the Himalayas, encountering a surreal cast of characters. He also experiences perplexing and soul-stirring moments of discovery and madcap wonder that define modern-day India-taking in the good, the bad, and the indifferent in equal measure.

Written in a free-form, tell-it-like-it-is style and published now for the first time, over twenty years later, Ahearn offers a look at what it was like traveling before the Internet, email, and social networking-when it was still possible to get lost (and eventually found) in a country with more than one billion souls.