While the search yielded little information, an encounter Chavré had while in a seaside plaza in Mumbai stuck with her for years.

Quite randomly, a young girl with an amputated arm approached Chavré. She was carrying a beautiful baby, Chavré says, and the girl begged Chavré for money.

"Give me rupee. She my baby," is the phrase that sparked the ember of Chavré's first novel, "Blessings from Bombay," out this month from Oxide books, an imprint of Salt Lake City publisher Juniper Press.

The novel's main character is Gina Bartolli, a successful photographer unable to bear children. Chavré's real encounter with the young girl and the baby serves as the centerpoint of the novel.

"Gina poked her own nose into the folds of the little neck and drank in the fragrance. All babies had it. Her sister Elisa's baby had it, a dewy freshness that comes with newborn skin and lasts for months. Unlike any other, it was a scent that mothers couldn't get enough of, that made non-mothers feel cheated."

Chavré is a solid citizen - a mother of four, a member of many local art boards, the former president of the Utah Arts Council. In her novel, however, she's created a character who begins a quest motivated by loss and obsession, and is also on the razor's edge of the law, pursuing the purchase of the two girls.

" 'You can't just buy a baby,' Kenneth [Gina's husband] . . . said.

" 'Yes you can, you can buy anything in Bombay. You told me yourself that hundreds of Indian children are sold into industrial slavery every day. Or worse.'

" 'That doesn't make it ethical,' [he says].

" 'Weigh the advantages on both sides,' Bartolli tells her husband. 'What's truly ethical when life hangs in the balance?' "

What's clear in the novel is that the main character's life and happiness are more seriously imperiled than the two girls she pities and for whom she longs. And the distance between the reader's awareness of that fact and the main character's oblivion is the source of its dramatic tension.

Chavré says what the book delivers is less an object lesson in morality than the story of the "gift of the unexpected."

jcheckoway@sltrib.com

Passage to India

» Jo Ann Freed Chavré will read from "Blessings from Bombay" on Aug. 12 at 7 p.m. at the The King's English Bookshop, 1511 S. 1500 East, Salt Lake City. For more information, call 801-484-9100.

» The book is published by Juniper Press and Oxide Books.