Manik Mudigonda was born into (and subsequently rejected from) a highly scrupulous Brahmin family in India's holiest city, Benares. Now, in the heady days leading up to World War I, he is a lonely colonial solicitor in Mombasa, Kenya's most multicultural, metropolitan city. He possesses numerous physical deformities, including severe, patchy depigmentation all over his body, one bright red eye, a wiry shock of waist-length white hair, and hundreds of smallpox scars. He's a complete outsider with limited coping mechanisms, and he finds comfort in primarily destructive ways-alcoholism, bulimia, and committing adultery with married women. Manik, it is safe to say, is not your typical Casanova. Yet despite it all, his greatest joy is making women happy, and he falls deeply in love, again and again. Manik suffers without end, convinced that he is utterly unable to find someone to truly love him in return. "Memories of a Mombasa Gigolo" is a complex character study written in journal style that not only provides a rich picture of cosmopolitan British colonial Africa in the early 1900s, but also explores the most intimate realm of human emotion and sexuality while painting a portrait of one of the earliest and most fascinating melting-pot cities.

After a hasty escape to Egypt to avoid punishment for his partner, Lord Greenwich's vast financial crimes, former Mombasa solicitor and gigolo, Manik Mudigonda, is forced to adapt to a life without parties and without company in pre-World War I Cairo. Once again, the rejected Brahmin prince from Benares tries to find a niche for himself in an alien land that doesn't initially seem to have a niche for a piebald, red-eyed, bulimic criminal lawyer without much self confidence, and yet it is in arid, claustrophobic, poorly governed British Egypt that Manik's professional and personal lives come into full bloom. Not only does Manik's legal career flourish against all odds, fighting for his criminal clients' rights to appeal, coping with embedded corruption, racism, and constant condescention, but also he succeeds at initiating his first monogamous relationship, hidden from the disapproving glare of Egyptian culture. An ode to resiliance in the face of unusual hardship, the synchronicity of strength and fragility of the human psyche, and the elusive, inexplicable nature of love, Manik Mudigonda tries to narrate his life, if for no other reason than to try to remember.

After a hasty escape to Egypt to avoid punishment for his partner, Lord Greenwich's vast financial crimes, former Mombasa solicitor and gigolo, Manik Mudigonda, is forced to adapt to a life without parties and without company in pre-World War I Cairo. Once again, the rejected Brahmin prince from Benares tries to find a niche for himself in an alien land that doesn't initially seem to have a niche for a piebald, red-eyed, bulimic criminal lawyer without much self confidence, and yet it is in arid, claustrophobic, poorly governed British Egypt that Manik's professional and personal lives come into full bloom. Not only does Manik's legal career flourish against all odds, fighting for his criminal clients' rights to appeal, coping with embedded corruption, racism, and constant condescention, but also he succeeds at initiating his first monogamous relationship, hidden from the disapproving glare of Egyptian culture. An ode to resiliance in the face of unusual hardship, the synchronicity of strength and fragility of the human psyche, and the elusive, inexplicable nature of love, Manik Mudigonda tries to narrate his life, if for no other reason than to try to remember.

Manik Mudigonda was born into (and subsequently rejected from) a highly scrupulous Brahmin family in India's holiest city, Benares. Now, in the heady days leading up to World War I, he is a lonely colonial solicitor in Mombasa, Kenya's most multicultural, metropolitan city. He possesses numerous physical deformities, including severe, patchy depigmentation all over his body, one bright red eye, a wiry shock of waist-length white hair, and hundreds of smallpox scars. He's a complete outsider with limited coping mechanisms, and he finds comfort in primarily destructive ways-alcoholism, bulimia, and committing adultery with married women. Manik, it is safe to say, is not your typical Casanova. Yet despite it all, his greatest joy is making women happy, and he falls deeply in love, again and again. Manik suffers without end, convinced that he is utterly unable to find someone to truly love him in return. "Memories of a Mombasa Gigolo" is a complex character study written in journal style that not only provides a rich picture of cosmopolitan British colonial Africa in the early 1900s, but also explores the most intimate realm of human emotion and sexuality while painting a portrait of one of the earliest and most fascinating melting-pot cities.