Catherine Preus, Star Tribune

"I could see why Mom thought I ought to have written more about baking cookies and less about decapitations. But the decapitations had made more of an impression on me."

A memoir about a happy childhood (with the exception of Annie Dillard's "An American Childhood") looks fairly dull next to Rachel Manija Brown's grim and funny story of growing up in an ashram in India.

Mani, as she was called, was the only child among the "Baba-lovers," an odd collection of pilgrims who believed that Baba, an Indian guru, was God. Mani's beautiful but wounded mother spends much of the book chanting "Baba, Baba, Baba," while her dad sits back and observes the drama with stinging sarcasm.

In her writing, Brown certainly takes after her father, but with more humor. Yet she is also woundable, making the reader ache for her as she tries to survive Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Savior Convent School or a nosy pilgrim asking her, at age 18, if she's still a virgin "like Baba wants you to be."

Her strange life (even as a kid she realized it was strange) in a dusty and unlovely place is illuminated in bright flashes of humor or violence or exotic disease.

There are jolts of surprise at the cruelty Mani witnesses, as when the nuns at Holy Wounds make the children stand in the sun for hours, until some of them faint or vomit -- and are punished for it. Or when the child who stutters and doesn't read the language very well is made to read aloud, then beaten when he fails.

Brown muses about whether experience makes us who we are, or we mold our experiences because of who we are. Her book makes a good case for either side.

Her life in India provided plenty of the raw material to keep a teller of tales busy. But her experiences, in the hands of a lesser writer, could bog down in self-pity or veer into a cringe-fest for the poor reader.

Brown avoids those pitfalls with panache. In one chapter, Mani and her mom take a terrifying taxi ride in a driving rain (all driving in India sounds quite terrifying) that ends in nearly being crushed by an oncoming truck.

The title of the chapter: "101 Things to Do with a Baked Potato." You'll have to read it to find out why.

It was there that the guru they had been devoted to since their drugged-out Berkeley College days, Meher Baba (who Brown credits with the saying, "Don't worry, be happy), had established an ashram. "Its residents usually explained where it was by saying, 'Get on a train in Bombay, and go east for nine hours.'"

From the start, Brown was appalled. "I didn't care about Baba & But I knew there was nothing I could do. There was already an envelope in Dad's dresser drawer containing three one-way tickets to India."

Over the next five years a deep component of sheer misery would be added to that feeling of shock and helplessness.

She opens the book with an account of one of their rare vacations. The ashram "was located in what I had previously thought of as the most desolate place in India. But the expanse of brown-baked weeds about a hundred miles west of Ahmednagar was giving it some serious competition."

Stranded, Brown reads a fantasy novel while her parents squabble about whose fault it is there is no train to their mountain hotel.

"The novel's heroine, Harry, was a foreign girl who gets kidnapped by desert nomads and learns to ride bareback and do magic.

"Certainly I could identify with the 'kidnapped and taken to a foreign desert' part, though I wished I were enjoying my experience as much as Harry was enjoying hers. I also wished three of her magnificent desert steeds would appear, so we could ride them up the mountain.

"Mom poked me. ' Don't just sit there with your nose in a book. Pray with me.'" "On second thought, perhaps only one steed."

This pretty much sums up the family dynamic. Brown spent as much time as possible buried in a book, while her mother's response to everything was to chant, "Baba, Baba, Baba," and her father kept clear of the fray as much as possible.

Even the escape into books was made difficult. The ashram librarian was an unkempt, irascible Indian who took immediate exception to the compound's only child snooping around his tiny, dusty domain and began screaming at her to "Get out!" before they were even introduced.

School was even worse. A Catholic school where Brown was the only foreigner, it had English textbooks but classes were taught in Hindi. Brown, who had been an exceptional student, was soon failing. She might have overcome the language barrier if not for the sadism of her teacher, a type (not rare enough) whose professional zeal seems focused on the opportunity to bully those who can't fight back.

On her first day Brown took comfort in the thought that "Manija," the hated name that set her apart in America, would not be a problem in India and neither would its diminutive, "Mani," which rhymes with money. But after Mrs. Joshi introduced her to the class, she had the students open their books to a comic rhyme that poked fun at "Mani Mao," baby talk for "Mrs. Cat." Brown was thereafter known as Mani Mao and pelted with stones in the schoolyard and whenever spotted alone on the streets of the town.

As for her name, Brown changed it to Rachel the minute she graduated high school back in America and now delivers a word of warning: "Parents, if you do not want your children to write tell-all memoirs when they grow up, do not name them KhrYstYll, Pebble, or Shaka Zulu."

The ashram itself seems primarily populated by misfits and the mentally ill, whose ranks are routinely swelled with pilgrims from America. In all her years there, Brown made only one friend, a boy who stayed for some months and whose father was one of the deranged visitors. Her accounts of their role-playing adventures are the only carefree, unfettered moments in the book. The adult she most admired was, in the end, responsible for the most harrowing, disillusioning and cruel incident in her childhood.

Although the life she describes is miserable, Brown herself never appears pitiable. Although resigned, she remains full of spunk and spirit, saved by her imagination. She never connected to Baba or spiritual life in general and comes across as practical, independent, driven and engaging. These qualities, along with her writing skill, came in handy at age 12 when her father left India and didn't take her with him. It took her six months of daily letters to persuade him.

Brown interrupts her narrative several times, giving the reader views of her adult life (she's now an award-winning playwright and TV writer) and relations with her parents. She includes an account of her decision to confront the ashram years by writing about them, and her parents' reactions and input. This leads to a last page that is so perfectly apt it could have been fiction - but you'll know it's not.

Funny, brave and sharp, Brown gives us a heroine and a writer to root for.

By Lynn Harnett.

Born in the early '70s, Brown was raised in Los Angeles by parents still under the sway of master Meher Baba, though he had died in 1969. In 1980, they decided to relocate the family to his birthplace, Ahmednagar, to commune more closely with his spirit and with those who had experienced him directly. As a child, Rachel was thrust into a surreal life and experienced alienation writ large. Some members of the ashram spoke a perplexing language all their own: "Are you my mummy?" asked a 60-year-old member named Coconut of sever-year-old Brown. When she had no satisfactory response, Coconut offered that they were liviing in "the Kaliyuga Age" and that "anything can happen." Now a playwright, television author and comic writer, Brown here recounts her youthful trials: She was endlessly taunted by her schoolmates, beaten by her teachers, bored by the supplications to Baba. But she remains open minded: "We all have mental magnets for obsession waiting to encounter an idea or person or practice of the opposite charge," she concludes. "I can understand the fascination, even if I can't understand its object." Along the way, she renders a well-hewed look at Ahmednagar: it's free ranging water buffalo and holy cows; its reeking sewage; its experts in removing ear wax; its vendors of "cones of powder in crmson, saffron, orange, purple, hot pink, forest green, and indigo" for women to dab on their foreheads. In short, "Ahmednagar was overwhelming and beyond analysis, like a new primary color."

Reads like a novel and lingers in the mind. (Agent: Brian DeFiore/DeFiore and Company)