Travels with Beth, Alli, and Supriya

Under the Surface

By Beth Green

Sliding under the water on a scuba dive is like a vacation within a vacation for me. The rumble of boats’ engines and the slapping of waves against hulls is replaced by the calming, even sound of your own breath. There’s no space for worrying about the land-bound when you’re on a dive. Will your flight leave on time? Did you apply enough sunscreen? Where did you put your credit card after the bar last night? The surface world is only a few yards above your head--but its mundane problems can wait until the end of the dive. The world narrows, focuses, until the only thing of import is what’s in front of your mask. Here, a colony of brightly colored fish circle the crevices of their anemone home, suspicious of the curious scuba diver, who hovers, amazed by the play of sunlight on the surrounding bright green sea grass.

Photo taken by Beth Green at Balicasag Island, Bohol, Philippines. Contact Beth on Twitter @bethverde or via her website bethgreenwrites.com.

Life’s Journeys

By Alli Sinclair

My journey with Novel Adventurers is not unlike the other journeys I’ve taken in life. I did lots of research, set out with a rough plan, and allowed myself to go with the flow and, most importantly, meet and learn from others along the way.

My writing, too, has travelled a few interesting roads since starting this blog. I’ve now signed with a wonderful literary agent and I’m working on a New Adult romantic adventure and an adult series that weaves present-day stories with historical. Luna Tango is my first book in this series and hopefully it won’t be too long before you see it on the shelves! You can find me here: https://www.facebook.com/AlliSinclairAuthor
with the latest updates of the wonderful journey called life!

Thank you all for joining me on my travels, and I look forward to hearing about yours!

The Big Picture

By Supriya Savkoor

Over the past three years of blogging at Novel Adventurers, I’ve had the thrill of circling the world many times over, experiencing vicarious adventures through our fascinating co-bloggers and guest contributors as well as sifting through my own travel memories.

We have covered much ground in this space. Hands down, my favorite topic has been all the overlap in cultures and customs. In particular, I’ve had the opportunity here to follow the many diverse paths that East Indian culture has traveled over the millennia. Through this lens, global communities that I previously knew little about—Cambodia, Fiji, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Iran, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, and Ethiopia, to name just a few—now feel as familiar to me as India itself and taught me how small our world really is.

Case in point: the woman featured prominently in the photo collage at left is Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the first elected female prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. She is the seventh prime minister of this tiny Caribbean country, and the second, after Basdeo Panday, of ethnic Indian descent. In 1889, her great grandfather left India and became a girmitiya, a term that describes the many Indian slaves taken to former British colonies and eventually settling there after gaining their freedom. Persad-Bissessar  took her oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s most sacred texts, although she says, “I have no specific church as such. I am of both the Hindu and Baptist faiths.”

 
Stories such as these, however far away in time or distance, are a part of my cultural heritage and travels. I hope they help inspire your own.

Bleeding Rouge: Lessons from Cambodian History

By Supriya Savkoor

There are novels that take you to a fictional world you feel you’ve been to, with fictional characters whom you feel you know personally, even wondering what happens to them after you close the book. Then there are novels that you have to read—the ones that plunge you in a time and place that open your eyes to realities so large, you are changed by them.

If you read my post from 2 weeks ago, you know that, for me, a stunning example of such a book is In the Shadow of the Banyan, a somewhat fictionalized version of author Vaddey Ratner’s childhood in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Books like these make you realize that human history is vastly more bizarre, more tragic, and more perplexing than any plot an author could conceive.

This incredible novel made the Cambodian genocide so real for me, in a kind of “no way could this have really happened” way, I gobbled up all of Ratner’s interviews, as many articles about Cambodian history as I could read, and even watched a couple of documentaries about the country. Heck, I even went online, googled “Cambodian people” to see their faces and find out, a generation later, how they’ve been holding up.

Anne Frank’s diary had been required reading in my eighth-grade English class in Texas. That first time I and my classmates learned about the Jewish Holocaust, we all turned to look at each other in utter disbelief, as though the teacher might have made the whole thing up. I learned a little more about the holocaust in high school, but that was the sum of my education about this facet of history. The takeaway for my young self back then was that, however catastrophic and appalling I understood this act of genocide to have been, it was the type of event that couldn’t happen again, definitely not in these modern times when we humans were supposedly smarter and more civilized than generations past. After all, photos from that era were in black and white, the police and SS uniforms looked like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie, as did the Führer’s goofy mustache and bizarre Nazi salute, which made him seem more like a caricature than a real person.

Of course, we all know  genocide and other mass atrocities occur all too often—anywhere, anytime. Consider Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. And just as often, we tend to avert our eyes and keep ourselves blissfully uninformed. Educators can and should change this, and making Ms. Ratner’s powerful novel required reading in history classes (not just the specialized ones, but the general ones) would be a great first step. No other novel in recent memory so aptly drives home the tragedy of such large-scale injustice—as well as the need for us to harness our collective responsibility and strength to prevent and end them.

Tevodas, Rakshasas, and Other Cambodian Lore

By Supriya Savkoor

A couple of months ago, my book club chose to read a novel that I hadn’t yet heard of—In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Cambodian-American author Vaddey Ratner. I must have been living under a rock not to have heard of this critically acclaimed first novel, but I’ll admit, I was ambivalent about this choice as I knew it would require some fortitude to read. It's set against the backdrop of Cambodia’s darkest hour—the 1970s, when the Khmer Rouge systematically decimated about half of its own people, through torture, starvation, and, most of all, outright murder. And yet I soon discovered this semi-autographical book is extraordinary, as uplifting and hopeful as it is heartbreaking.

As I’ve told nearly everyone I know, this important book has so many complex facets and layers to it that schools and universities should be adding it to their required reading lists. Which subject? Take your pick—history, psychology, sociology, ethics, religion, spirituality, politics, cultural studies, philosophy, literature, even poetry.

And add one more to that list: mythology, which also happens to be the topic of the week here at Novel Adventurers. (Oh, but how I would really love to expound on all those other topics!)

Ratner’s story led me to a startling discovery—that many aspects of Cambodian civilization were influenced by Hindu myths, legends, and folklore. It’s startling because, while the faith of nearly all Cambodians is Buddhism—a faith that also hails from India, but has morphed into the local cultures and more or less lost its “Indianness”—I could not have conceived of a Southeast Asian culture that's seemingly so different from Indian culture, yet so closely aligned to it. Especially when it comes to ancient Hindu mythology, which is still very much alive in present-day in India and, it seems, in Cambodia as well.

Ratner seamlessly weaves in mythical characters that are often as real as her human ones. She also infuses her story with poetic metaphors such as my favorite, the one about the Reamker. 

A mural that shows a scene from the Reamker at the
Royal Palace in Phnom Pen, Cambodia. (Photo by hanay)

Hopefully, it’s no spoiler to tell you about the beginning of In the Shadow of the Banyan. We enter the privileged world of our protagonist, seven-year-old Raami, a Cambodian blue blood. Surrounded by her loving family, Raami enjoys all the joy and magic of an innocent childhood. While sitting under a banyan tree (an image evoking the Buddha) in the courtyard of her family’s palatial home, Raami begins rereading her favorite book, the Reamker.

“In time immemorial there existed a kingdom called Ayuthiya. It was as perfect a place as one could find in the Middle Realm. But such a paradise was not without envy. In the Underworld, there existed a parallel kingdom called Langka, a flip-mirror image of Ayuthiya. There, darkness prevailed. Its inhabitants, known as the rakshasas, fed on violence and destruction, grew ever more powerful by the evil and suffering they inflicted.”

I include that passage because, on several levels, it fills me with awe.

The story of the Reamker is surprisingly familiar to me, one that I too had read many times as a child of about Raami's age. It’s the Cambodian version of one of India’s best-known epics, the Ramayana, one of Hinduism’s most sacred texts and one of India's most popular mythological legends, comparable to Greek and Roman mythology. Hailing from ancient times, the Ramayana, is filled with a pantheon of gods and goddesses who have inexplicably human desires and weaknesses. It's part of the traditional Hinduism belief system, while for some (even in India), it's a colorful story steeped in philosophical themes combined with the magic of mythology.

A view of Angkor Wat, the world's largest
Vishnu temple, in Angkor, Cambodia.

The story of the Ramayana/Reamker is also a brilliant metaphor for Ratner’s novel. As the title(s) of the former imply, it's the story of Rama (aka Preah Ream), whom Hindus believe to be a human avatar of the Lord Vishnu. As the story goes, Rama led a happy, privileged life as a prince in the benevolent kingdom of Ayodhya (Ayuthiya). As a young man, he’s banished for reasons out of his control. He spends years in exile, far from home and separated from most everyone he loves. Soon, his wife is abducted by a jealous king from Lanka (modern-day Sri Lanka, called Langka in the Cambodian version). Ram eventually returns home but not before a long, bloody war pits all the forces of good and evil against each other and ends in devastating losses for both sides.

Sound familiar? Yes, it sums up Ratner's telling of the Cambodian genocide, with young Raami as a sort of avatar of the noble Ram. Raami is exiled into a world filled with rakshasas, in the form of Pol Pot’s vast army of soldiers, and tevodas, angels who are perhaps counterparts to the mythical devas that fend off the devil’s rakshasa minions. Raami’s father is frequently compared to Indra, the powerful god of thunder and lightning, who also happens to be the king of the devas (the good guys). And, of course, even after it was all over, there
                                                                                 were no winners.

For thousands of years, the story of the Ramayana has been performed in
plays and dance all over Southeast Asia. This photo, a postcard scan, 
shows the Royal Ballet of Cambodia performing the Reamker in the
courtyard of the Silver Pagoda in Phnom Penh sometime between the
1900s and 1920s. This particular postcard depicts a scene from a battle
between Rama and Ravana. Starting in 1900, F. Fleury published
a series of postcards featuring such scenes from the Reamker in China.
The publication year of this postcard is unknown, but it is suspected to

be taken during either King Norodom's reign in Phnom Penh or during
the early years of King Sisowath's reign. Author Vaddey Ratner herself

is a direct descendent of Sisowath royalty.

The rest of Ratner's novel is likewise steeped in the Hindu mythology I grew up on, albeit with a Cambodian flavor.

One other surprise entailed references to the old animal fables known as Jataka Tales, filled with morality lessons. These short stories, which some historians say inspired Aesop’s Fables, had titles such as The Monkey King’s Sacrifice, The Mouse Merchant, and The Demon Outwitted. I'd always presumed the Jataka Tales to be purely Indian, so I was surprised to learn through In the Shadow of the Banyan that the Jataka Tales are equally well-known all over Southeast Asia. Considered to be a recounting of the Buddha’s previous births, in both human and animal form, the stories impart the virtue and wisdom of the Buddha as he appears to us in all his worldy forms (and, of course, teaches that god is within all of us).

 Po Romem, Hindu temple from the Cham era
near present-day Phan Rang, Vietnam.

(photo by Irdyb)

All of this cross-cultural exchange, it turns out, occurred because, for a few thousand years starting in the first century, Hinduism dominated as both a religion and a culture in Cambodia—and to varying degrees, in modern-day Laos, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia (see my related post here), Java, Bali, Vietnam, and even the Philippines. Hindu kingdoms across this region were later described as “Indianized” kingdoms or states, part of a “Greater India” or “Farther India.” India’s influence, however, was entirely cultural, not connected in any way to politics or government. (Historians have called this India's "cultural expansion" and even "cultural imperialism.")

Much of Southeast Asia's oldest sacred texts, literature, and philosophy were written in the ancient Indian languages of Sanskrit and Pali. Though these languages are now archaic (used only in sacred Hindu and Buddhist texts), modern-day Southeast Asian languages still retain vestiges of them. Southeast Asian names in general also sound a lot like Indian ones. And it's said that the name of the country Singapore, known as the Lion City, is based on the Sanskrit words simhah for lion and puram for city. (Simhah puram sounds a bit like "Singapore," right?)

For thousands of years, Southeast Asian kings stylized themselves after Indian devarajas, or god-kings, a bit like Prince Rama from the Ramayana. These kings took on royal, Indian-sounding names, such as Jayavarman VII (Cambodia) and Wikramawardhana (Java), and consulted Brahmin priests from India before making big decisions, such as going to war or relocating a capital. They performed the Hindu ritual ceremony known as a puja. Some even adopted the infamous caste system.

These kings also erected numerous temples and statues—many of which survive today—in honor of Hindu gods and goddesses. Cambodia has preserved one of the world’s only two temples dedicated to Brahma as well as the world’s largest Vishnu temple, Angkor Wat, located in Angkor.

The Hindu kingdoms of Southeast Asia flourished for about a thousand years, before, bit by bit, they began infusing more Buddhist beliefs in with their Hindu ones until, eventually, Buddhism prevailed. As I learned from Ratner’s amazing novel, remnants of the region’s Hindu past still linger and inspire. And the title of In the Shadow of the Banyan suggests that despite all that young Raami, and Ratner herself, experienced, a higher force had protected them all along.

(A post-script: I'll be writing a follow-up to this post in 2 weeks, when we cover book reviews. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit Vaddey Ratner's web site, www.vaddeyratner.com, or connect with her on FaceBook. Most importantly, read her book! I'd love to hear your impressions.)

Off the Beaten Track: Italian Style

This week’s Off the Beaten Track contributor is the wonderful Louise Reynolds, a contemporary romance author who lives in Melbourne, Australia. By day she works in the commercial lighting industry, lighting anything from bridges to five star hotels. By night she’s working her way through a United Nations of fictional heroes, all inspired by her travels. Her debut romance for Penguin’s new digital romance imprint, Destiny Romance, is now available within Australia from www.destinyromance.com and Amazon, Apple, Google and Kobo. International buyers can purchase from www.destinyromance.com from early next week. You can contact Louise at www.louisereynolds.com.au and https://www.facebook.com/LouiseReynoldsAuthor.

My debut novel, Her Italian Aristocrat, is set in the Marche, a part of Italy rarely featured in romance novels. Although its eastern border lies on the Adriatic, the Marche’s hilly interior is not particularly well visited by tourists, at least not those on tight timetables who want to hit the highs: Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan. But it rewards the tourist prepared to get off the beaten track with picturesque hill villages, elegant towns and an abundance of ancient monuments.

Almost certainly I wouldn’t have visited the Marche as a tourist. And I wouldn’t have written my book but for a business trip to the area when I stayed in the historic hill town of Macerata. It was only a short trip but the town buried itself in my subconscious and what happened to me there made its way directly into my story.

The town is well over 1,000 years old and sits on the site of a more ancient settlement. It’s hard to say what is most appealing about hill towns. Is it the view from below with the town rearing majestically above as in a fairy tale? Or are the wonderful views over verdant plains littered with stone houses best?

Marcareta, photo by Mi Ti, Fotolia.com

Macerata has all the elements that make you long to pull up stakes and move there. Honey-stone buildings glow in the afternoon sun while narrow, shady lanes weave between them, havens of cool retreat in high Summer. Homes, shops, restaurants, and civic buildings seem piled on one another. It’s a town of stairs, breathtakingly strenuous at times, with elegant shops and piazzas, a basilica, and one of the oldest universities in Italy, founded in 1290.

It also has the extraordinary Sferisterio, an enormous neo-classical arena built in 1820 by public subscription. Every Summer a world famous open-air opera festival is held here. I was entranced by the thought that Macerata’s citizens had loved opera enough to build their own venue until I learned that it was originally erected to stage games of that other great Italian passion, soccer. Or, more specifically, pallone col bracciale. A hugely popular sport from the mid 16^th to early 20^th century, pallone players were once the highest paid athletes in the world.

The pallone field is distinctive in that it has a lateral wall for rebound of the ball. In effect it’s a half arena, an ovoid split down its length and perfectly designed, ‘post-pallone’, to morph into an open-air opera venue. With dozens of private boxes situated between soaring columns, dramatic accent lighting and perfect acoustics, the Sferisterio has become world famous. 

Sferisterio - Photo by Drimi

But it’s not just about universities and opera. The Corso Matteotti is lined by beautiful palazzi reminding us that although this region was traditionally quite poor, relying on agriculture and crafts, it was under local lords for much of its history. Amongst the most distinguished palaces is Palazzo Marefoschi. In this grand house Bonnie Prince Charlie, ‘the Young Pretender’, was married in 1772.

Palazzo Marrefoschi, photo by Mi Ti, Fotolia.com

One of the most attractive aspects of Macerata and the region in general, is that the citizens speak little or no English. Local restaurants don’t spruik for business by cycling competently through half a dozen languages till they hit on yours and no one at the hospital, including doctors, spoke English (which I found to my cost). It has all the hallmarks of real life in a regional Italian town rather than a made for tourists experience.

For my next book I’m heading to the Australian outback. I love the huge horizons, vibrant colour, and eccentric characters found in this vast area. Beyond that, Colorado and New Mexico are on the radar for next year. I’m keen to see the Pueblo de Taos adobe structure in Taos and to experience the artistic communities of both Taos and Santa Fe. I’m sure there’s a story in there somewhere.

Off The Beaten Track: Bollywood with a Twist

Author Shobhan Bantwal is an award-winning author of six novels, multicultural women's fiction with romantic elements, branded as “Bollywood in a Book.” Alli offers a review of Shobhan’s latest book, The Reluctant Matchmaker, here. Her debut novel, The Dowry Bride, won the Golden Leaf award in 2008, and The Unexpected Son won the 2012 National Indie Award for Excellence. Shobhan’s short fiction has also won honors and awards in nationwide competitions, and her articles have been featured in The Writer Magazine, Romantic Times, India Abroad, India Currents, and New Woman.  

As a teenager growing up in the sleepy, dusty little town of Belgaum in southwestern India, it was inevitable that I would be influenced by Bollywood, the affectionate and slightly mocking term for Bombay Hollywood (Bombay is now referred to as Mumbai). India churns out more movies each year than any other country in the world. Why? Because a movie packed with action, emotion, songs, dances, and a dramatic love story offers the perfect escape from the poverty and despair that plague India's masses.

Movies are highly popular in India. People save money for tickets, then stand in long lines in the blistering heat or soaking rains of India to see their favorite heroes and heroines on the big screen. In recent years, Bollywood movies, with their color and spice, have even charmed many American movie-goers. Some recent examples are Bend it like Beckham, Slumdog Millionaire, and Monsoon Wedding.

As a young adult, I was an avid reader and fan of popular American and European fiction. I was puzzled as to why the exciting Bollywood tales could not be adapted to books. If America could have its Harlequin and Great Britain its Mills and Boon, why couldn’t India have its own version of romance fiction? After all, Indian movies are basically romances, and India is the land of the Kama Sutra, the only known ancient primer on the art of love-making.

After waiting in vain for decades for an Indian romance author to emerge, I decided to write "Bollywood-in-a-Book" myself—at the ripe age of fifty. By then I had made a happily married life and a successful career for myself in the United States. I call my writing career a “menopausal epiphany,” because it was a delightfully unexpected bonus, not unlike a late-in-life baby. My books are women’s fiction peppered with emotion, drama, romance, and lots of cultural detail—many of the essential elements of Bollywood.

However, when I first started out as a starry-eyed, aspiring writer around 2002, I had no idea how difficult it was to break into the tough fiction market. I had naively assumed that mailing copies of my manuscript to various publishers would stir interest in my unusual ethnic stories. Alas, I had to face the harsh realities of acquiring a reputable literary agent, editors and their stringent requirements, publishing houses and their many submission rules. Back then, self-publishing had a stigma attached to it, so I was not willing to follow that route to publication.

In my long quest for the perfect agent to represent me, I was supremely lucky that the late Elaine Koster, a wonderful and iconic agent-publisher, loved my unique fiction and signed me on as a client. She sold the rights to my books to Kensington Publishing, a mid-sized New York publisher that is still considered the largest privately owned publishing house in the world.

As a former publisher, Ms. Koster had published famous names like Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison, and as an agent, she represented noted New York Times’ bestsellers like Khaled Hosseini and Kimberla Lawson Robey. Although Ms. Koster sadly passed away in 2010, and the agency has shut down since then, I will always remain deeply grateful for her warm support and expert guidance.

I have had six novels published by Kensington to date, all featuring Indian or Indian-American characters. The themes range from hot-button social issues like dowry and female feticide in contemporary India to sweet and romantic stories about second-generation Indian-Americans born and raised in the United States and facing the unique challenges of straddling two diverse cultures. My books have reached thousands of readers in North America as well as many other parts of the world. The feedback I receive from my readers about my rare tales that combine arranged marriage with romance and social interest themes is indeed heartwarming for me and my family.

The Reluctant Matchmaker, my latest novel, is a vivid blend of contemporary Indian-American culture with an unconventional romance. When petite Meena finds herself irresistibly attracted to her strikingly tall boss, Prajay, a man who's determined to find a statuesque bride to complement his remarkable height, how can Meena convince him that she is his perfect soul-mate? Is she willing to make some sacrifices to win the giant's heart?

The book trailer and excerpt for The Reluctant Matchmaker can be found at www.shobhanbantwal.com along with information about my other books, videos, contests, recipes, photos, and reviews. Also, visit my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/ShobhanBantwal.author.

Culture in Translation

By Heidi Noroozy

Don’t you love seeing your familiar world through the fresh lens of a stranger’s eyes?

I do.

So do my husband’s relatives in Iran, who are amused at my take on things they accept without question. They grin at my naiveté when a shopkeeper at the bazaar repeatedly insists that my purchase is a gift for a guest to his country, and I believe him. In fact, he’s dissatisfied with the price we’ve negotiated and wants more money. Or my fascination with the way the small bags of garbage people put out daily seem to vanish overnight. And my puzzlement over why people put out bones for the feral cats that no one would allow inside their homes—to catch rats, naturally.

Firoozeh Dumas flips the coin for me in her book, Funny in Farsi, a memoir about growing up Persian in Southern California. Born in Abadan, Iran, an oil town on the Persian Gulf, her family moved to a suburb of L.A. in 1972. In this slim volume and its sequel, Laughing without an Accent, Dumas points out the idiosyncrasies of American life with an irony that is often laugh-out-loud funny.

She is bewildered by the unappetizing names we give to food: hot dogs, catfish, Tater Tots, and sloppy Joes. “…no amount of caviar in the sea would have convinced us to try mud pies,” she writes.

Her first trip to a public lending library introduces the book-loving Firoozeh to a concept so wondrous and perplexing she doesn’t quite believe it at first. Surely no one would actually lend her a book for free! She brings her purse and a few coins along just in case. At seven, Dumas learns that there is such a thing as a magic carpet, only it’s called a library card.

One of my favorite chapters in Funny in Farsi is “The F Word.” And no, she doesn’t mean that f-word. The essay is about her name and the difficulty many Americans have in remembering or even pronouncing it. In Persian, Firoozeh means turquoise. “In America, it means ‘Unpronounceable’ or “I’m Not Going to Talk to You Because I Cannot Possibly Learn Your Name And I Just Don’t Want to Have to Ask You Again and Again Because You’ll Think I’m Dumb or Might Get Upset or Something.’” And so she tells everyone her name is Julie. Nice and simple. Problem solved. Or at least until her American friends meet her Iranian ones and she can’t remember who knows her as Julie and who calls her Firoozeh.

Boy can I relate to that! But for me, the problem is reversed. I’m often confused by the various Persian/American configurations of names my Iranian friends and relatives use, but usually the Farsi versions are easier for me to remember. They are the ones I learn first. When I’m used to people calling themselves Shahab, Faribourz, or Sharzad, it throws me when they call on the phone and say, “This is Dean.” Or Freddy or Sherry.

In both her memoirs, Firoozeh Dumas writes with a gentle, wry humor. She pokes a gentle fun at Americans and Iranians in equal measure, pointing out not just the oddities of American culture through her non-native eyes but also the absurdity of her own reactions to it.

Whether you’ve lived abroad, married into another culture, or just have immigrant friends, these books offer something we can all relate to—with a smile and a chuckle.

Off The Beaten Track: Return to Kashmir

A California transplant now living in Denver, Mark Stephen Levy left his job as a sales executive for a major technology company to spend two years traveling through Europe, Morocco, India, Nepal, Tibet, and China and to write his first novel, Overland. The story is set in Afghanistan, but Mark's travels in India helped set the tone to enable him to write his book. He also writes for a cable TV show, Food Paradise, based in New York City. You can read more about Mark and his novel as well as his adventures in India on his web site, www.overlandthebook.com.

When my adventure/romance novel Overland was published in India early last year, my publisher strongly suggested I come to India to promote it. They didn’t need to ask me twice. I had once toured India in the mid-’80s. I was in a state of rapture the entire time and left with life-changing impressions. I longed to return, and finally, here was my chance!

I got to spend 10 weeks touring around the country, from the Himachal Pradesh towns of Dharamsala and Manali then down the road to Rishikesh and later Kolkata. Then farther south, to Mumbai, Goa, Bangalore, and Kerala. I even gave a speech at a university, Central University Jharkhand in Ranchi. I hadn’t been to any of these places before, yet the place I wanted to visit the most was one I’d already been to on my first trip to India. That heaven on earth known as Kashmir.

Back in 1985, I’d chanced upon a houseboat called the Pala Palace. It was situated on Dal Lake, parallel to the main road in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. I’d stayed a week with Aziz, the owner of the houseboat, along with his family. I integrated into their lives with thought-provoking, culturally rich activities on their boat. I’d become especially good friends with Shefi, Aziz’s 14-year-old son.

Naturally upon my return to Kashmir, I thought how cool it would be to see if Aziz, Shefi, and the houseboat were still around. I arrived into Srinagar’s airport slightly travel weary. When asked by the tourist officials at the airport about my stay here in Srinagar and where my base would be, I mentioned Pala Palace, the only name I knew. A local Kashmiri man nearby overheard this exchange and approached me.

“Yes! I know Aziz and Pala Palace. It is new Pala Palace. Aziz is my cousin.”

He directed me to take a certain bus outside the terminal into town then go to a certain hotel, where Shefi would meet me and take me to the houseboat. I couldn’t believe I was going back to the same houseboat and would see Aziz after 26 years!

Now, outside the airport was another matter. I caught the right bus towards the hotel, but a local guy with a long beard intercepted me and wanted to show me to his houseboat. I turned him down and told him I’d be staying at the Pala Palace, yet we rode the bus together into town. He seemed amiable enough and who was I to say he couldn’t ride the bus?  When we got off the bus, he became insistent about my seeing his houseboat. Sometimes, these sorts of things happen and we just have to go with the flow, so … we went to his boat.

It turned out to be a really nice boat, great views and quiet. Even better, they had Internet! When I realized I wasn’t going directly to the Pala Palace, and knowing I had six nights in Kashmir, I figured that was okay. Here I was back in serene and peaceful Kashmir, after all.

I spent a quiet, familiar, and ever exotic first day, savoring the Thursday afternoon. It was a special day in celebration of the coming Islamic holiday on Friday, as prayer calls from all directions were heard bouncing off the lake. It was intoxicating and purely mystical.

Later that evening, through the channels of how things go, Shefi and another man, Aziz’s brother, showed up to this other houseboat. When I didn’t meet Shefi at the hotel, word spread all the way back to the airport and security that an “American arrived and wanted to stay at the Pala Palace but never showed up.” Somehow, they traced my steps all the way to accompanying this bearded man to the other houseboat, and voila, Shefi found me.

Aziz, 26 years later

Immediately, we embraced. He was 26 years older, but it was definitely Shefi. I asked about Aziz, and they whisked me off to go see him and the Pala Palace, leaving my bags behind. The Shakira, a small boat that’s the standard means of transportation throughout the lake, pulled alongside the Pala Palace, and there was Aziz. He was much older now, in his 70s, and looked a bit sickly, but he still had that spirit I loved when we met so long ago. He told me he’d been worrying all day about what could have happened to me, repeatedly calling me “my American friend.” His voice was more gravely than ever, his English still rudimentary, but his effort to communicate and the vibes he gave off were touching.

We went to the back of his boat with various members of his family and all talked for a bit over a few cups of tea. We caught up on the past couple decades we’d lost touch. I told him I had written a book and that he had been the inspiration for one of my main characters in Overland. The plan was for me to return the next day with my bags, which I did for two nights. Being found by Shefi this way blew my mind, and what was to follow in the coming days turned out to be the best week of my life.