Posts Tagged ‘ Third-culture kids ’

There’s a jeweler in my new book, Emeralds Included. His name is Mr. Shah. Jana’s son, Jack, doesn’t trust him, but Jana finds herself hypnotized by Mr. Shah’s poetic and knowledgeable musings on gems. When I was growing up in India in the 1950s and 1960s, my family got acquainted with a jeweler who was both an artist and an excellent businessman. Mr. Nanda Lal Varma was then just starting on his career. He had no storefront; carrying …Read More

Lee and I aren’t twins, but my mom often dressed us in matching outfits, sometimes even cut from the same cloth as her own dress. Left to right: Ruth, Betsy with dog, Everett, Jane, Lee. Chennai, 1953. Here, still in Chennai, we’re flanking Jane, who has graduated from rompers to a pinafore. “How’d I get here?” she seems to be saying, “between these two bodyguards?” At this point in our lives, our mother chose our clothes, but Lee …Read More

Long after we returned from India, my mother used to brag about the birthday parties we’d had there. She pitied the poor pathetic kids who had grown up in the States, since they didn’t have the resources for a bang-up celebration. Such as street entertainers—dancers, snake charmers, performing monkeys, stilt-walkers, acrobats, puppeteers, jugglers….you name it. Best of all, in my mom’s opinion, was having a merry-go-around set up in the yard, and that was always my favorite, too. …Read More

At our house in New Delhi, during the 1950s and early 1960s, our head bearer (major domo), Pratap Singh, ran the show. Pratap came to us on our first night in Delhi. My travel-weary parents were already on the job and had to go to a formal reception; the hostess told them that she’d send someone over to mind me, Lee, and Jane, then aged eight, six, and two. Come evening, there was a knock on our hotel …Read More

December, 1952: My mom doesn’t look all that encumbered in this picture, but actually she was within a very few weeks of delivering my sister Jane to this world. My parents had arrived in Madras (now Chennai) just the previous month. They’d traveled from the US via London, Frankfort, Istanbul, Beirut, Basra, Karachi, and Delhi, with my sister Lee and me in tow. Lee and I carried Pan Am bags full of coloring books and games, plus a …Read More

We were not horsey folks ourselves, but our neighbors in Delhi, the Ensmingers, kept three horses, and allowed us to ride them.   I was very enthusiastic for a while, and I usually rode a large and phlegmatic creature called Shah.   With the Ensminger kids, we tried to use him in one of our theatrical performances.  We staged the play in the driveway so that one of us could jump on him and dash off, crying “Hi-yo, …Read More

Greetings for the Big Day–in other words, Merry Christmas! Christmas Eve in India, we hung stockings in preparation for Santa’s coming, as in this 1958 photo. My sisters Deborah and Jane are standing on three-legged stools that tended to be tippy, but somehow we escaped mishaps. The Nataraj on the mantelpiece (Lord Siva as cosmic dancer) witnessed many such ceremonies. The suitcase-y thing on the right was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, playing “White Christmas” and “let it snow, …Read More

Our house in New Delhi got flooded, in 1958. It was during the monsoon season, and a drainage ditch near our house overflowed its embankments, leaving a foot or so of water on the ground floor of the houses in our neighborhood. I hate to think of what was floating around in that water, but I ended up wading in it as my dad took pictures. You can see the high water mark on the living room wall. …Read More

Every couple of years, we came back to the United States from India for about three months. Some things my sisters and I loved about home leave: ice cream, television, and magazines to name a few. Other things we were less fond of, including running the gauntlet of inquiring relatives at family reunions. We could predict the questions: Have you ever seen the Taj Mahal? Have you ever ridden on an elephant? My sister Lee and I both …Read More

By the time the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel opened, I’d practically memorized the trailer. Who can resist Judi Dench mistaking a gin and tonic for a glass of water, or Maggie Smith refusing to eat something she can’t pronounce? So, hooray, last weekend, I saw the film, a gentle comedy about seven British retirees who travel to what they think is going to be a luxury retirement hotel in Jaipur, India. I loved it, just loved it. I …Read More