Last Week’s College Tour – In Search of India

Last week I was driving from one New England town to another with my wife and younger daughter, a junior in high school. During our gazillion mile tour of small liberal arts colleges, I was beginning to get desperate for Indian food – none was to be found anywhere. But it wasn’t just the lack of tandoori chicken that was giving me cold sweats by the end of the week. There was no indication that India even existed for these lovely colleges nestled in the farmlands of rural Maine, hilly Vermont, and old industrial cities of Massachusetts. The tour guides and information sessions boasted of new science labs, million-book libraries, and sparkling athletic facilities. They bragged of junior-year abroad programs in Spain, Italy and, of course, China. But India with its 1.2 billon people could have been on another planet.

I was despairing until the sixth day, when we landed at Hamilton in upstate New York, some ten miles from Utica. Sitting in the Admissions Office waiting for the campus tour to begin, I noticed an large rectangular book on the coffee table. The cover showed a black and white photo of Indian women selling wares in the streets of Ahmedabad. I opened the book and discovered the most incredible photos from the 1930’s. Taken by the celebrated photographer Pranlal Patel, they documented the lives of Gujarati women at work in their neighborhoods and markets. The photographs were commissioned by Jyoti Sangh, a social reform group dedicated to ending domestic violence, among other evils.

My heart began to pound. One of the main themes in Simon’s Ark is domestic violence, and from the start I’ve intended to donate profits from the book to an NGO working to end this canker in the heart of Indian society. Then I discovered the book of photographs was co-authored by Lisa Trivedi, professor of history at Hamilton College. It was as if a plate of hot somosas and tandoori chicken had fallen into my lap! Ah, home again!

I marched to the front desk and asked to see a course catalogue, hoping to find out more about Professor Trivedi. Was she real? Where was her office? What were the courses she taught? Could she put me in touch with Jyoti Sangh? Questions started flashing through my mind like a deck of cards as parents and high school students filed out of the building for the tour. I spent most of the next hour resisting the urge to break away and scurry off to find Professor Trivedi. (After all, I had already heard the same canned speech at five previous colleges.) Good that I didn’t, since I would have barged into the professor’s office unannounced like a madman, ruining any chance of my daughter being admitted to Hamilton.

This quirky incident at hints at my obsession with India and my longing to be back on the Subcontinent—an almost a ravenous urge to relive India again, with its colors, smells, spices, beautiful women, painted lorries, ten-armed goddesses, and all the rest of her madness. But for the last two decades, the idea of living in India again has been a non-starter.

As a suburban dad, I’ve been living the proverbial American dream: a wonderful family in a lovely bungalow house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. When I did travel, it was to China to build EMSI, the international green building consulting company I founded. India wasn’t even on the back burner of my Weber barbeque. By the time I left EMSI in 2011, my wife had founded a start-up called Interfaith Youth for Climate Justice. She wasn’t going anywhere and our two daughters were still in school. The only way I could get back to India was in my imagination. Writing Simon’s Ark was the next best thing to buying a one-way ticket to India.