Culture July 13, 2009

Cheeni Rao’s head was full of chatter. Though outwardly a good Indian-American son (a stellar student-athlete from a Chicago suburb), the lanky teen was plagued by violent impulses that caused him to pick fights, break into houses, and even torch a building. One of the few things that could quiet his destructive inner voice was drug use, as he discovered early in his college career. But that method invited mayhem of its own. Rao’s rapid descent into addiction, drug dealing, robbery, and vagrancy is the subject of his memoir, In Hanuman’s Hands.