Follow the River

"I am only a drum. It is up to all of you to play the tune. I am but the blueprint for a temple. Each one of you shall be a pillar."So the holy man speaks to Paul and Janaki and the others who will make the friendship march with him along the Ganges. Paul is the son of a German physician who carried out criminal medical experiments in Nazi prison camps. Disillusioned with his father's generation, Paul seeks peace and purpose in Israel, where he meets Janaki, a Brahman girl on a foreign-study grant.When she returns to India, he goes with her to join the friendship march that will emulate Gandhi's last great pilgrimage for peace fifteen years earlier. Gandhi had tried to heal the differences between Hindus and Moslems...and now Babu's little band, in which there are young people of both faiths, will go upriver to the places where enmity between the two sects still leads to bloodshed.In the end Paul and Janaki find themselves engulfed by new danger from the north, a crisis that tests their love for each other, their faith in Babu, and the convictions by which they live and die.