Exotic Marshmallow

KUMARI (287 pp.)--William Buchan --Morrow ($3.50).

With this novel of romance and intrigue, the second son of the late Lord Tweedsmuir, more widely known as John (The 39 Steps') Buchan, takes his own first fictional step. Buchan fils proves that like Buchan pere he can turn a marsh-mallow-weight tale until it is neatly toasted. The setting is India; the set is buna sahib; the time is mainly the '30s; the season is boredom. But at least two men and one woman think there is more to India than what can be seen through the bottom of a gin-sling glass.

Henry Greenwood, head of a kind of latter-day British East India Company, is in a running fight with his fellow officers to liberalize the company's treatment of its Hindu employees. Armin Wensley is a multilingual young Foreign Office expert bent on improving Anglo-Indian understanding. Laura Johnston is a ravishing brunette who prefers Armin to her busy Blimp of a husband.

Author Buchan is not one to break up an erotic clinch, but amusing traces of British practicality crop up in the lovers' dialogue (" 'Oh Armin, you've covered me up! You are kind!' 'I was afraid you might catch a chill,' he said.") The husband soon puts a deep chill on the whole affair by taking Laura back to England.

But where romance leaves off, intrigue begins. Greenwood, for whom Armin has gone to work, builds himself a kind of Shangri-La up on a hill, and turns it into a finishing school for a lovely sun-kissed Hindu teen-ager named Kumari. Race-conscious troublemakers start spreading ugly rumors. What happens to Greenwood and who gets Kumari makes for a skin-prickling ending that will either have readers biting their nails or sharpening them on the throat of any kill-joy who gives it away.

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