When flighty, promiscuous and willful Amruta Deshpande, in an act of filial rebellion, hitches her life to that of the HIV- positive Milind Gaitonde, little does she know what destiny has in store for her. Her boy-friend breathes his last in the little mountain hamlet where he has been taken for convalescence. Amruta finds herself posing as a god-woman to escape the wrath of the puritan villagers in whose eyes adultery is the most unforgivable of sins. Her desperate posturing catapults Amruta into the thick of rustic undercurrents as she realizes that under the apparent simplicity, village life comes with the usual horrifying deviations and pervert behavior patterns that occur everywhere else in the world. Forced to confront and tackle rape, murder, sexual exploitation in the name of religion, female infanticide, possession by spirits and natural calamities among other things, Amruta resorts to oratory, the gift of the gab and personal charisma to pull her self out of every spiritual crisis while struggling to keep her credibility intact in the eyes of the villagers.At some crucial point down the line however, Amruta Deshpande starts morphing. Shaken out of her pleasure-seeking privileged upbringing, she begins to respond with an amazing genuineness to the need of every situation. She cures a young victim of snake-bite venom, a schizophrenic from the grip of supposed ghosts, a jaded old man of suicidal intentions and the village idiot from escalating idiocy while all the time wondering whether the fates are playing a trick of co-incidences on her. In her self-appointed role of a spiritual messenger, she continues to dupe the villagers into expecting the promised messiah while scheming to escape to Bombay at the first chance she gets.
When a decadent tantric (a shaman-like person who taps the dark side of the occult for his powers) re-enters the arena it is a clash of the charlatans with Amruta pulling out all stops to outsmart her adversary and retain the post of official spiritual leader. In this desperate fight to survive as leader in the village of Basuli, Amruta finds her self plumbing the depths of her heart and intellect and coming up with amazing answers to all the murky social, moral and climatic problems. In tottering from one spiritual challenge to the other, she finds herself wreaking repeated miracles till at one point she is deeply convinced that she is morphing from a con-woman to a real god-woman.
With an opportunity to escape suddenly presents itself, Amruta finds herself crossing a strange meaningful chasm of personal beliefs and she retraces her steps back to the village of Basuli even as a whistle blows in the distance and the departing train chugs off without her.
Tracing the free-spirited and fun-loving heroine’s journey from amorous to ascetic and from messenger to messiah, the book juxtaposes the Westernized rational urban mindset against myths, superstitions and traditional folklore of rustic India. A web of imagination spun around cornerstones of science, The Messiah attempts to take the reader to the edge of reason and back.