Book description
When his father dies suddenly, Grant Gordon's life descends into
freefall. Having long harboured an obsession with the British in
India, and in particular what they did for recreation, Grant goes to
find the golf courses the British built during the Raj and decides to
play them.
Along the way, he has a golf lesson on the highest golf course in
the world, in the mountains of Kashmir; negotiates cobras, peacocks
and monkeys in Delhi - on a course moulded by the British around the
ruins of a Mughal emperor's palace; has a round with Indian Army
colonels in the shadow of Everest; gets drenched several times over on
the wettest golf course on Earth; and searches on Tiger Hill for
Darjeeling's lost British golf course. In Agra he tees off in full
view of the Taj Mahal, while in Lucknow, the ghosts of the famous
siege during the 1857 Mutiny seem to affect his swing. Throughout, he
is faced with the challenge of getting his golf clubs to increasingly
obscure locations, using an array of quirky transport.
As Grant travels across India, he slowly begins to understand the
relationship he had with his father. Cobras in the Rough is a book
about golf but also about fathers and sons, and the ways in which they
follow, or refuse to follow, in each other's footsteps.
