‘Firanghi’: to Farroukh, the cafe´ owner whom Baumgartner sees everyday, this is who Baumgartner is and always will be, no matter how long he has lived in India. Like its synonyms in other Asian languages – ‘gaijin’ in Japanese and ‘gwai lo’ in Cantonese spring to mind – ‘firanghi’ resonates of more than just its semantic translation as ‘foreigner’. Implicated in the word is a derogatory verbal gesture at a subject-formation who is outside the indigenous social pale, and a naming of that anxiety felt by the indigene at the stranger's presence in his community. The stranger, according to Zygmunt Bauman, is neither friend nor enemy, and unincorporable into the binary opposition of the two. He can shift between the two sides or terms of the opposition, and because he is constituted in the in-between, his presence threatens ‘the sociation itself – the very possibility of sociation’. If estrangement and homelessness as conditions of existence are recurrent concerns in Desai's fiction, they certainly haunt her narratives about foreigners in India. Before Baumgartner, the foreigner-as-stranger is the subject of the short story ‘Scholar and Gypsy’, published in Games at Twilight, about two Americans in India. More recently, in Journey to Ithaca (1995), Desai once again coordinates her interests in the foreigner in India and India in world history which we have seen in Baumgartner's Bombay, to set in motion a new fictional dialogue about home and homelessness, home and the world. In these works, the firanghi – the foreigner-as-stranger who is at once friend and foe, embarked on a journey in India which can only be a foreign quest, at home in India and inevitably homeless – is that problematic subject whose presence forces India to turn inside out, to estrange from itself, in order to recognize and negotiate his or her difference. Desai's fiction about foreigners in India participates actively in India's self-estrangement, and its cross-cultural recognition and negotiation of difference.

In its title, ‘Scholar and Gypsy’ sets up clearly the opposite positions of the American couple David and Pat, and their arrival and passage through India are marked by their experience of this opposition on a number of levels. David is a dull character, a sociology student identified by a view of ‘India’ as object of inquiry, who cannot begin to understand why ‘India’ seems to overwhelm his wife.