 And I'm going to go ahead and start the webinar on my side. And then, Michelle, you're on. Hi, everybody, welcome. Everybody's coming in the room right now, I think. Welcome to San Francisco Public Library, everyone. I'm Michelle Jeffers, and you're here for Grotto Nights. I hope you're in the right place. At the library, we do like to start all our programs with the land acknowledgment, so let me begin with that. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Romitish-Alone peoples. We benefit from living and working on their traditional land and as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights. We wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Romitish community. If you want to join us, please use the chat and tell us what territory you're joining from today if you know. And you can use the map linked in the chat as well to look it up. Again, I'm Michelle Jeffers. I'm the Chief of Community Programs and Partnerships with the library, welcoming you tonight. We're at the main library right now, and this is our latest installment of the Grotto Nights programming series, talking to new and emerging writers about their process, their writing, and what they're working on and what to look forward to in your library very soon. Before we get started with our discussion tonight, let me highlight a few other things that happened at the library this season. If you're reading this summer, which I bet you all are, please get credit for it by joining Summer Stride, our annual summer reading program. It's for all ages, it's not just for kids. If you read 20 hours this summer, you can earn a free, beautiful, whale-focused book bag. You can find book lists and recommendations for all readers of all ages, tons of free programs, free books for kids when you visit the library and more, all at your neighborhood library. And there are 28 of us, so I bet there's a neighborhood library near you. You also might wanna come back in August for our next Grotto Nights. That will be on August 9th. We'll feature Why We Love Mysteries, the genre and motive of discovery with Terry Tierney, Pia Chatterjee, and Sophia Reddy. This month, July and August are on the same page library book club is When We Were Sisters by Fatima Oskar. It's newly out in paperback. This book was long-listed for the National Book Award. It is a tale of siblinghood, loss and love and what it means to be Muslim in America. We'll have a book club talk on this book on Monday, August 21st, and then an author talk with the author on Sunday, August 27th, so be sure to come back for that. And also this weekend, you'll wanna join the library and whole team at the new farm out at 10 Cargo Way in San Francisco, which is over in the southeast quarter. The new farm will be jumping with live music, dancers, book giveaways, arts and crafts, plus goats and chickens, and the bookmobile, which everybody loves to go on board. So again, check us out, find the library at the new farm and just come for a fabulous fun festival on Saturday. All right, again, tonight we have our Grotto Nights for July. The topic is South Asia. Inside Insights and Outside Observations with writers Sarita Cervarte and Maxine Shore. Let me tell you a little bit about them and then they'll join and start their discussion. Maxine is an award-winning children's book author and travel essayist. Her critically acclaimed books for young people include picture books, as well as middle grade and YA historical novels. Sure as travel essays have appeared in numerous publications and she has twice won the Lowell Thomas Award given by the Society of American Travel Writers for Excellence in Adventure Travel Journalism. Maxine's award-winning travel memoir, Places in Time, was named the best travel book of the year by the North American Travel Journalist Association. Wow. And then we have Sarita, who was born and raised in India. She came to the US to attend graduate school at UC Berkeley. For 25 years, she wrote the last word column for India Currents, a monthly magazine catering to the Indian diaspora. Her topics have ranged from India's nuclear tests to female infanticide to dowries and other evil aspects of Hindu patriarchy. Her award-winning op-eds have been published in multiple media outlets locally and nationwide and she's been a featured commentator on national public radio and locally KQED. Currently, she is preparing to publish her memoir, Midnight's Daughter, about the life she has lived in defiance of the Tapu's, her native culture. Please give a warm virtual welcome to Maxine and Rose. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, yes. That was very flattering. So I just wanna say, I am incredibly excited to be here with Sarita. I didn't know anything about Sarita when we were paired for this program, but in the process, I've been absolutely riveted by her memoir and just enjoy knowing Sarita as a person and a friend now. And so, Sarita, I'm really keen to hear you read from your memoir, but first I just wanted to ask you, when and how did you start to write? Did you think about that when you were a child? How did that happen? Yeah, so I guess I, like all good students in India, I went into science, still studied physics and later energy and research, but I always loved stories and books and reading. So I guess deep down, I always thought that I wanted to be a writer, but it was not something I really expressed as a desire because becoming a journalist in India is like taking an oath of poverty, you know, so. But anyway, so I think it just so happened that I sent, actually in America, how I started writing is I used to read the Oakland Tribune, which back then was a big newspaper. And I would say, you know, I would read these op-ed columns and I would say, well, you know, I can write better than this. And then I thought to myself one day, maybe I should test this theory whether I can actually write better. And I sent an article op-ed column and they published it in their editorial pages. That's how it began the journey, you know, of writing. But I have to say that before that, I lived in New Zealand where you, Maxine, also lived. So we have that in common because we both started writing in New Zealand, although you were there earlier than me. And I just took an extension class at the University of Auckland from a teacher who it was a nonfiction class from a writer who had published histories of Maori people, you know, the natives of New Zealand. And he encouraged me to write one of my, you know, send my essays, one of my essays to a magazine there and they actually published it, which was a shock to me. So, you know, it's anyway, so our journeys are in a way similar in that sense about writing. Yes, and I think that New Zealand, I think the time that we were there, I was there a little bit before you because I was there in the 70s was a place that had just so many opportunities because it was underpopulated. And it was a small country in which you could dip your toes into a lot of different, you know, occupations and, you know, advance fairly quickly. So, yeah, it was a great incubator for both of us. Before, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I did want to ask you, I know that, you know, you've done so much journalism, but what prompted you to write your memoir? When did it, when did the idea come into your head that maybe you should put your own life down on paper? You know what happened is I started writing for the Tribune and stuff, but then India Currents invited me to write the column for them. And in the beginning, I would just give them the column that I was writing for Oakland Tribune, you know, but over time I started to write more about South Asian issues, particularly issues that affected women, you know, in India and South Asia. And I was, I brought sort of my personal experience. That's my style of op-ed writing. I bring a little bit of my personal experience to the issue at hand. So I started talking about having been a dowry bride and having an arranged marriage. And what I discovered is that I was removing a veil from these issues that nobody, people were afraid to talk about. They wouldn't talk about these things. But when I talked about them, I got letters and emails saying, you know, they were very grateful for me for talking about these things. And so that's kind of how it started, the idea that I probably should write about my life because it's been, it's very revealing to a lot of people and they identify with it. And even in American mainstream women in the US, you know, they've gone through their struggle with feminism and they've fought against sexism and discrimination and all that. So they also relate to my writings when I talk about these issues. So I think that's where it started, you know. And here I am, now I've got this manuscript. I don't know what's gonna happen with it, but I'm working on it. So- Well, I think all good things will happen to it for sure. And I was also gonna ask you, you know, often people hesitate to write about their own lives to put their own life out there for the public because they're afraid of what their relatives will say, how they'll be perceived, whether it will change the family dynamics at all. And I was just wondering whether you had any of those fears. Well, you know, I think, yeah, you're right. I'm getting those fears now. All this time I thought, oh, nobody's gonna read this thing. And, you know, to be honest, a lot of my relatives in India do not actually, they always praise me whenever I get any award or get attention or like, you know, my posts on Facebook. But a lot of times they don't read it, you know. Some people, I'm counting on my relatives not reading it. Yeah, yeah. I'm worried about that a little bit now. My parents are gone, but, you know, there are other people. I haven't really been mean or angry. It's not an angry book, but it's, you do have to, I mean, I even worry about some of my friends, you know, because, I mean, I'm very close to my friends from that period of my life. But some of them, you know, I depicted incidents that happened in a very honest way, but they might feel offended by that, even though that's not my intention. So, yeah, so that is a concern. But hey, you know, I'm always being kind of bold in many ways, so we'll see what happens. I can tell that from your memoir that you're always pretty gutsy. Yeah. Even as a kid. So, yeah, yeah. I think maybe without further ado, I think you're gonna read the part about your wedding. Is that correct? Yes. Well, I know the background, but, you know, you wanna share the background of the part I'm only going to share a little bit of the context. I took away a lot of the extraneous details that might confuse the listeners. But I do wanna explain that my birth name is Aruna, which is how I'm referred to in this segment of my memoir. And I was actually named by my father after this freedom fighter named Aruna Safali. So that's where my birth name comes from. And it will be explained in this expert why I changed. And in this portion of the memoir, I've just become, I became engaged to my husband, my fiance, whose name is Sharad, after meeting him once for a few minutes. And then I was not sure about having the wedding, marrying him, but they kind of manipulated the situation so that he's relative, so that I, they announced that I was already engaged to him or something, they arranged this ritual, like kind of like a surprise. And then at the last minute, he wrote a letter to my father asking for a dowry. And my father at that time felt that at that point, if I backed out, because the wedding was all arranged and everything, that of course, it will be my reputation that would be ruined, you know, not the boy's reputation as usual. So that's why he pressured me to enter this marriage. And of course I didn't realize, I thought in all my, many of my friends had arranged marriages, I thought, well, you know, how bad could it be? Everybody does it, but anyway, so here is, here goes that name of the chapter is, what's in a name? It's my wedding day, draped in a green silk sari. I face the goddesses. I'm supposed to dip a rose petal into the bowl of holy water and sprinkle it upon the statue of Durga. Instead, through the wooden grill, I watched the activity in the wedding canopy. This morning at five o'clock, Aunt Shobha's voice boomed in my ears. Aruna, wake up, are you really asleep or are you pretending? And men go forward on the other side of the partition. I woke up with a start, realizing it was my wedding day. My wedding day. I bathed with scented oils for Aunt Shobha's instructions. And now I'm sitting in this inner sanctum of the rented wedding canopy, worshiping the idols I feel no affinity with. It is 1973. Why are we following such antiquated rituals? The photographer charges the flash, the drummer poises his wrists, my father dada rushes to the entrance. Women follow, carrying garlands to welcome the bridegroom's party. My mother I stands in the doorway between the inner sanctum and the tent, eager to see for the first time the man her daughter is about to marry. I too have strained to recall my fiancee Shara's face. And at times she has appeared to me, a handsome man with curly dark hair and pearly white teeth. And at other times he has seemed a blurry figure at the end of the parade of men I have been exhibited to during the last year or so. Am I getting married just to avoid the humiliation? Arns line up at the entrance to spray the gas with rose water out of silver pitchers. The group of professors and researchers from the physics department stand in a corner, occupying a different universe. My friend Shama ties a string of jasmine around my forehead. I recall my friends blushing as they don their bridal accoutrements. But I feel like a sacrificial animal, flanked by his brother and sister-in-law. Sharad walks into the wedding canopy. His parents, brothers and sisters follow. This is my husband, I tell myself, but I do not believe it. It does not look like a man who could be my husband. It does not fit any of the mental images I have cherished in the corners of my mind. My body does not stir at his side. A garland in hand, I walk to the wedding platform and stand behind the strap-front-colored cloth. Two priests are holding up. I sense Sharad's presence on the other side. People gather around, Shama nages me forward, I bow. Priests chant the mantras. Their sing-song voices rising about the den. I'm about to link my destiny to the man standing on the other side of the cloth. I would be his, not only for this life, but for the next seven incarnations. Kuryat Sadamangalam, the priest sing the finale. People throw colored rice onto our heads. The holy cloth is removed. Traditionally it is at this moment that the bride and groom see one another for the first time. I, too, am about to see my husband for the first time. Those five minutes in Bhopal hardly count. I push the tassels away from my eyes. Two timid eyes peer at me from behind a string of flowers. This is the stranger who demanded the ransom of a dowry from my parents. His downward-gazing eyes, slack demeanor, and thin lips do not correspond to the hostile act he has perpetrated. How do women make love to men they do not know? How do they surrender to husbands who have demanded dowries? How do they avoid feeling devalued? I cannot. I only feel a mixture of dread and aversion. I cannot imagine being intimate with this stranger. My heart and soul are rebelling against it. Every limb, every muscle, every cell in my body wants to run away, like the 17th century poet Ram Dass, who, after being coerced into an arranged marriage, fled from the wedding tent and seeking refuge in an ashram, devoted his life to philosophy and literature. But there are no ashrams to seek refuge in, no forest to take shelter under. The only flight I'm capable of is a flight of the soul. It leaves my body now, sitting on a wooden beam at the roof of the canopy. It watches the wedding rites. I become the little girl who, leaping through my father's books, felt that she belonged to a faraway land. I abandon India with all of its ritual superstition and faith. I inhabit my childhood feeling of alienation and make it my own. My soul bifurcates, creating a continent of its own. Arun Shobhan adjusts me forward. The Shannai breaks into a merry tune. It's now or never. I put the chrysanthemum garland around Sherrod's neck. He puts a garland around my neck. Everyone claps. The priest leads us to two low-red platforms facing one another. We sit down. My husband's tie, I note, sports a tacky design of pink cars. Pink cars, the holy fire rages between us. The priest hands a ladle to the groom. He takes it reluctantly, as if expecting to pass it on to someone else. The swami orders him to pour ghee onto the holy fire. Why are we doing this stupid ritual, Sherrod says in a whiny voice. It's completely meaningless. It has no scientific basis. Women carrying trays of sweets stop in their tracks. Men put down their cups of tea. Children see jumping on mattresses spread on the floor. Shut up, I wanna say. My father is paying for this. The least you could do is be polite. It's ironic, I think, that the bride and the groom both hate the ritual they're performing. This is not a meaningless right. The priest replies in English. I have a PhD in Vedic scriptures from Bombay University. I only do weddings for families who have known my family for generations. If you don't value your culture, how will you keep your integrity when you go to America? Sherrod becomes speechless. At the priest's command, I rise. Sherrod takes my hand. We begin the saptapadi, the seven circles around the holy fire. The bridegroom's palm I notice soft and clammy. In Bollywood films, the heroine walks around the holy fire with the villain who has coerced her into marriage. But just as the bride is about to take the seventh step, the hero appears shouting, stop the wedding. Is there a precise moment at which a Hindu wedding becomes irrevocable? I wanna ask the priest. Or is it just a myth? Bombay film has concocted in imitation of Hollywood, where the lover invariably makes an appearance before the bride says, I do. Sherrod takes the seventh step. I follow. I gamble away my life. I'm married forever and ever to a man I do not love. Female cousins arrange banana leaves in front of wooden seats and draw colorful rangori designs around them. Guests sit down to eat, but no one takes a bite. It's customary for the bride to put the first morsel of the feast into the groom's mouth while rhyming his name in a lyric. This ritual has come about because traditionally women are not supposed to utter their husband's names. The only time a woman says her husband's name is during this ceremony. Why does the groom not recite the bride's name? I wonder. Come on, Aruna, don't be coy, Aunt Shoba says. You can say it in English if you want, my brother-in-law says. Sherrod's brother, that is. I sit by Sherrod's side, picking up a piece of jellybee from his plate. I say, smashing the atom and unleashing the particle is no miracle compared to the marriage of Aruna to Sherrod the Oracle. I thrust the sweet into his gaping mouth. I have never felt more foolish in my entire life. I go through the rest of the ritual in a haze. Sherrod and I sit on a sofa accepting gifts. So I have, what a good-looking boy you have formed, someone says to my father. I look sideways in surprise with his sharp nose pointed in curly dark hair and white even teeth. My husband is handsome. Why then does he stir nothing in me? Is it the dowry that's coming between us or the fact that he's a complete stranger? As evening approaches, I brace myself for the farewell ceremony. It's customary for the bride to throw her arms around her mother and sob hysterically. Weddings turn into funerals during this ritual. Even men, sad songs are played on loudspeakers. Your daughter never belonged to you in the first place, they say. The rightful place was always with her in-laws. Don't you cry, my friend puppy whispers. I see my mother eyes standing in a corner, lips moving silently to some inner voice. I look at Dada hovering at the edge of the canopy. My parents have never embraced me. They would not begin now in public. I see my brother standing among a group of friends, staring at me with large sad eyes, but I cannot uphold the luxury of emotion. I cannot risk putting my arms around the eye and Dada and letting my pain drown me. Sitting on the red platform, I face a plate of rice grains. The bridegroom is expected to write the bride's new name in the rice. In our state, it's customary product for a bride, not only to get a new surname, but also a new first name. Like a mafioso in the witness protection program, her identity is completely erased. Mario Puzo's grandfather has recently hit the best sellers list, so everybody knows about that. In a nod to modernity, girls are given the choice of new names these days. Among my friends, Chitra has selected the name Anuprittha, Shyamadha name Anurupal, Pappi the name Anuradha. Why names starting with Nanu are popular? I have no idea. Girls don't like the names their parents have given them my gifts and jump at the opportunity to pick a new one. No one has asked me for a name, so I assume that I will remain Aruna the freedom fighter. The priest nods at Sharad, he scribbles a word in the grains. I cannot decipher it upside down, but the Sadhu reads it for me. Sarita, he says. We have brothers in law named Savita and Anita. Sharad's brother says, now we will have a Sarita. Have I become a part of a rhyming scheme? This morning I woke up as Aruna, the color of dawn in Sanskrit, but tonight I have become Sarita, a river. So that's the end of my reading chapter. Sarita, did you ever think of going back to your original name? Yeah, I did actually in the beginning in Berkeley when I went to graduate school and when my grad school classmates found out the story of my name, they started calling me Aruna. But you know the problem with the name Aruna is that Americans don't pronounce it correctly. That's the problem. Because it's a rolled N, it's a null sound, it's not a null sound, they can't say it. So I was very torn between the two names because Sarita is very easy for Americans because it's also a Latin name, you know, little Sara. So in fact, my Latin friends call me Sara now, which is far from my original name. Really far. I was absolutely riveted by that segment, which is so powerful and so poignant. And I wanted to ask about the situation of dowries. I mean, this was in, was it 1972, 1973? 1973, yeah. Yeah, and so could you speak a little bit to what's the situation with dowries today in India? You know, it's still, the custom still prevails, nobody talks about it. That's the thing. Nobody says, oh, we get sick and sick dowry. It's all done very underhand, but it happens. There was a woman, I don't know if you heard about that. It was a big story in the Indian diaspora, media of the Indian diaspora, but there was a student of physics, a graduate student studying at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, where I studied, you know, physics and she was married. And I guess her in-laws, they were upset with her because the promise of whatever dowry was promised, the parent father didn't pay it or something that they couldn't afford it, I don't know. And it, the harassment became so, so severe that she committed suicide. And this is only like, you know, a few years ago, just recently. So it just shows you that the practice still prevails and, you know, nobody tries to change anything, that is the problem. Yeah. And, you know, the Bollywood films can often give a false impression of arranged marriages because often in the Bollywood films, there isn't arranged marriage and maybe, you know, one or both parties aren't really keen on marrying the other one, but then it all works out beautifully in the end. But you, you're really giving the true story of what it is truly like and what it feels like. And one of the questions I wanted to ask you was that, I know when I got on your website, it said that your writings for any occurrence had created a certain amount of controversy. And I was just wondering if you could maybe explain what kind of controversy that was. Oh yeah. I mean, I wrote a lot of articles about Hindu patriarchy, criticizing the culture. You know, I even wrote articles about caste system, classism in India and so on. And I did get long, long hate letters from time to time, mostly from men, you know. And then, you know. But then women wrote a different, they gave the different side of the story because they would often write me their very intimate stories of what happened to them. You know, their marriages and particularly a lot of women when they were brought over here, like a guy, you know, and he gets a degree here, he goes to India, gets a degree at a job and goes to India and marries a woman that his parents choose and brings her here. And she's completely dependent upon the guy, the husband. And then they often suffered abuse and domestic violence and so on and so forth. And so, you know, these stories, these women wrote to me in these letters. So I know I was doing the right thing, but I don't mind being controversial. I think if I'm hitting a spot that means I'm doing something right, you know, that's my attitude. So, but the society also changed, you know. Over time, I think the Indian American community had changed. And the second generation people, you know, the younger women, they read my articles, I was surprised to find this. And so it changed now. I mean, I take some credit for that myself among other people. That's great, that's great. I mean, those letters that you got, it could almost, they could almost be an anthology in themselves about these women's lives that the women have told you about their own, their own weddings, their own stories. True. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I just wanted to ask one other question because I know we're gonna have, we're gonna continue the conversation after I read, but I also, on your website, I saw your watercolors, your lovely watercolors. And I was just wondering, do they connect in any way with your writing and how you got into that? Yeah, you know, I just, I don't know, I just always wanted to try visual art, and something that was always, so when I retired from my day job, I temporarily retired because then I got another job. I did take a class in watercolors. And I just found it very useful because it exercises a completely different part of your brain than writing does. You know, and it's an almost a very wonderful meditative experience. I was taking this class at the workshop, you know, at Merritt College. And I would go there on a Friday afternoon and I did this big studio surrounded by people, you know, who are all working on their projects. And it was a fantastic experience. So yeah, but I originally, I thought I would do some watercolors of Indian scenes, which I've never done, but I ended up doing a lot of watercolors of Italy, which I love. So anyway. That's great. That's great. Yeah. So I think what's interesting about our connection, one of the interesting things about our connection is that we both, well, I traveled in and you lived in a pre-globalized world in the 1970s. So it was very, very different than the world of today. And I thought perhaps I'd read my section and then you and I can talk a little about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's switch now to you and yeah, tell me a little about how you started writing and the idea behind this memoir and so forth. Sure. Well, so what happened was that I was, I was going to school in Berkeley like you were. And when I graduated right before I graduated, I got married, I was quite young at the time. I mean, I was 21 and my husband at the time and we made a deal that I wanted to see Europe. I'd never been to Europe. And he wanted to immigrate to New Zealand. Well, I barely knew where New Zealand was in those days. And so we made a pact that we would go to Europe and then we would go overland. We would go on that long journey following the Silk Road which is now called the Hippie Trail. And we would end up in New Zealand where we would immigrate. So not thinking too much about it, that's exactly what we did. And we left the country in 1971 and we traveled for a year and a half. We had very little money between us. We actually had $1,000 between us and that lasted a year and a half. So you can imagine we lived pretty austerely. We hitchhiked all around the Caribbean thinking that this tramp steamer we were on would bring us to Europe and that didn't happen. So that was an adventure. We went all the way through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and we hitchhiked this tramp steamer and then we flew to Europe and we ended up camping in the middle of Paris which nobody has ever done, but we did it. Then we lived in Switzerland for a while, got kicked out in the dead of winter. And so in the dead of winter, right before Christmas, we drove our van from Switzerland to Pakistan. And then we traveled through India and Nepal and down through Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore hitchhiked all across Australia and finally came to New Zealand where we lived for five years. So it was quite an adventure. And when I got to New Zealand, I had so many incredible memories in my mind and stories that I really wanted to tell. I wanted to tell people what Afghanistan was like and what it was like in these small villages in Mexico and on and on and on. And at that time in New Zealand, without any internet and with expensive phone calls and expensive airfare, you really felt that you had dropped off the edge of the planet and a lot of people in New Zealand, most people in New Zealand hadn't really traveled very much. They, people in North Island, if they were lucky, they went to the South Island and vice versa. And so as a result, nobody really wanted to hear about my stories. So that's what kind of brought me to writing them. And I at first wrote them for children. I wrote about what it was like to live in Turkey and my adventures in Southern Turkey living with a fisherman's family. And those got published by the New Zealand Department of Education and they were illustrated by a very well-known illustrator, Victor Ambrus, very, very renowned English children's book illustrator. So that launched me. I wrote my first two children's books in New Zealand. And when I, and I was determined to become a children's book author, which I did. And then when the Russians had invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, I wrote my memories of Afghanistan. And before I knew it, I had become a travel writer and began writing initially for the San Francisco Chronicle for Don George. And that was a wonderful experience. And in fact, my travel memoir, Places and Time, several of the stories in it were first published in the San Francisco Chronicle. So that's my story. I'm still doing travel writing. I'm working on my second book and I'm still writing children's books and teaching both those topics as well. So without further ado, I thought I would read from my book, Places and Time. Yeah, then I have a few questions to ask you. Yeah, yeah. And so I don't have an essay on India, but I do have one on Nepal. And since it's South Asia, I think we can have an interesting discussion about what it's like to see a country as an outsider and what it's like to see the country from the inside. So this story was originally published in the Christian Science Monitor and it's called The Little Bagers. And just as a little background, my husband and I had come to Kathmandu. We actually arrived in a donkey cart those days. And we were wanting to rent a motorcycle so we could go up into the Himalayas. In Kathmandu, the motorcycle rental shop was so small. Stephen and I had to wait our turn on the quiet side street outside. High in the Himalayan kingdom, the late afternoon sun yielded the temple spires and soft-hewed the medieval wood buildings. In the burnished air, even the wait to rent a motorcycle would have been pleasant had it not been for The Little Bagers. The Little Bagers were boys ranging in age from about seven to 13. Their hair matted, their bodies filthy, their voices harsh. They roamed the dusty streets barefoot and in rags, aimless as a swarm of flies. Now as they gathered nearest, I looked away. When a Western person goes east, he goes mad. An English traveler in India had told us to protect your sanity, look away. But I failed to look away soon enough. So I saw that they were taking turns. No, they were fighting for turns to swing a desiccated rat by its tail. It seemed the object of their game was to see who could swing it around the fastest. The boy's delight was great, for the rodent corpse could alternate as a lasso, a yo-yo and a softball. When the boys grew tired of their games, they hurled the rat like a frisbee across the street. Then they noticed us. Mr. Please, money, money, Mr. Please, I am poor, you give money. Their loud voices were like the crude barks of harbor seals. As the beggars came close to us, I recalled that their louse filled hair, open sores and rat-steamed hands. No, we said, shooing them away. No, I said, remembering other travelers' cautionary words. You can't give money to all beggars, so better not give to any. When you see begging kids, they're not really poor. Their parents teach them to scam money from tourists. Give to charities, not individuals. It's arrogant for Americans to help beggars in other people's countries. You're disrupting another culture's society. We run to the Honda motorcycle. And early the next morning, we wound our way through the Ponchcal Valley. We zipped along a narrow mountain road that wound among deep gorges and snaking rivers. Outcroppings of towering pinnacles covered by cascading creepers loomed above us like gigantic weather tombstones. We had entered the misty landscape of a Chinese scroll painting. And it was then I had a revelation. The Chinese vertical landscapes I had admired for so many years in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum were not, as I had believed, stylized depictions of mountains. No, the artists had painted these surreal spiked vine-covered pinnacles because they saw spiked vine-covered pinnacles, the limestone formations called karsts. My revelation that sometimes the reality defies preconceived notions and turns out to be precisely as it appears was at that moment both exhilarating and humbling. On our return to Kathmandu, we went for a walk in one of the villages. And it was here I was rushed at by a mangy dog and bitten on the back of my leg. The dog bite forced us to stay in Nepal in extra two weeks so I could receive daily rabies shots. Taking advantage of our extra time, we bicycled through the countryside, ate lemon meringue pie every afternoon at Chai and Pai on Pai Alley, talked to the living goddess through the gate of her courtyard, took tea in the home of a Tibetan refugee and fed the monkeys at the Golden Simabumath Temple sitting beneath its four all-seeing eyes. One afternoon, we were standing in front of one of the medieval temples in Kathmandu watching a tinerant performer's juggle pots while crossing a rope strung between two poles. I noticed weaving among the spectators some boys selling something. The boys had short combed hair. They were dressed in clean shirts and trousers and they wore shoes and socks. The boys wove through the crowd holding large enamel plates covered with muslin tea towels. Crepes, mitchou, crepe, midam, they asked. The little beggars. From talking to other travelers, this is what we learned. The very day we arrived in Kathmandu, there also arrived two young men from New Caledonia. They were traveling through Nepal intending to stop no more than a couple of days where they were intent on trekking. The day they arrived, they noticed the orphan boys begging. The men followed the boys and discovered that they lived on the windswept roof of an abandoned building. The next day, the men rented an apartment and then bribed the boys with food, deloused them, bathed them and bought them clothes. Discovering the boys had never been to school. The New Caledonians rented another apartment to serve as a classroom. In the one week, Stephen and I had been sightseeing, the boys turned from beggars to school children one week. The men were now giving them daily lessons in reading, writing and math. They were also teaching the boys how to make crepes so that they could earn their own money. The men vowed the boys would never beg again. During the rest of my stay in Kathmandu, each time I saw the boys with their steaming plates of homemade crepes, I marveled at their seemingly enchanted metamorphosis. Soon, however, we heard that the Nepalese government and the New Caledonians were in the tug of war over the boys. The government charged the men with meddling in Nepalese society by teaching the children a useless language, French. The New Caledonians argued that they had also hired teachers to teach the children Nepali and English. But then the government accused the men of committing cultural imperialism by educating beggars above their caste. The men argued that the goal was to find adoptive parents for each one of the boys and that might happen outside Nepal. The government then branded the men as kidnappers and threatened to deport them. The young men appealed to the United Nations presence in the city for support. On May 18, 1972, I received my final rabies shot. On this day, our last one in Nepal, one of the former beggar boys handed us the flyer. It said, you are welcome to visit our school. Come eat delicious French crepes, 8 p.m. That evening, with a small group of other foreigners, we climbed the rickety stairs to the apartment classroom and entered a back to school night for orphans. The day had been hot and the walls still radiated warmth in the small room where children's art was everywhere. Math problems were written neatly on a portable blackboard. The boys showed us their artwork. One of the younger boys had drawn an elephant in a kind of patchwork design and then colored it with every color in the 88 crayon box. And when I admired it, he wrote his name on the picture and gave it to me as a gift. An older boy who had picked up a good deal of English from travelers sang a song he had written. The boy sold a lot of crepes that night. A year later in New Zealand, I opened the Wellington Post and saw the headline, They Now Have a Home. Beneath the headline, I don't know if this will show on the, but there's a picture of them. Yeah, you can see it. Did you see it? Yeah, you can see it. Now have a home, yeah. Beneath the headline was a photo of the boys when they were still beggars. The article accompanying the photo explained that Robert Kosola, one of the new Caledonians who had rescued the beggars was in Wellington raising money for them. The boys were now living in a Jesuit monastery outside Kathmandu and they were learning the restaurant business. Over the long years, I have returned often to San Francisco's Asian Art Museum. And when I stand before the sublime Chinese landscape scrolls, my thoughts returned to Nepal in that afternoon in the mountains. When I realized the truth about these paintings, they represented exactly what the artists saw. They were precisely as they appeared. And I remember too, the little beggars of Kathmandu and what should have been apparent to me then, the filthy beggars were children, precisely as they appeared to two young men. Thank you. That's great. So, yeah, I wanted to ask you because listening to something about Nepal or India in very similar countries, one of the things I wondered about is whether you felt, because whether you felt you were privileged as Americans traveling around the world, because when I was a child or even a younger person in my young adulthood, I saw foreigners and they were kind of like symbolized for us and a sort of entitlement and privilege. And they were almost, we couldn't penetrate their lives in a way. And so I wonder if any of that entered into the equation as you traveled the world. Absolutely. It first struck me when we left, California went down to Mexico and we stayed in some very small villages where we saw the poverty there and felt like very rich gringos, even though we weren't. In the United States, we would have been considered poor hippies, but because we were American everywhere we went, including India, we were looked upon as wealthy. So that struck me very strongly that no matter how poor we may have thought we were, we had a VW van and we always had a meal. Maybe it wasn't very cheap meal, but we always had a meal and we could always go home. We could always go back to the United States. So there was always this sense of privilege that was there. In fact, I'll just tell you a very quick little story when we were in Afghanistan and we were not only in Afghanistan, we were in an absolute boondocks of Afghanistan. We were way out, we were on the way to Maasari Shara from Kabul. And we got stopped by the nomadic tribe, they're called the Kuchi. And they have these yurt tents which they set up from place to place with their sheep and they ride on camels. And we came upon them and they begged us to stop and they took us to see a boy who was about 10 who had a very bent leg. He was crippled, he couldn't walk normally. And they thought that since we were Western people and we had a van that somehow we could help this child. And then they brought out a cow that was sick and we were absolutely helpless. We couldn't help them, we didn't know what to do, we were not doctors. And there were very few doctors in the country. We flagged down a UN vehicle thinking that maybe they could get some help. But that was a realization that simply because we were Western that people thought we had this incredible power. Right, yeah, I found talking of Afghanistan, I found your section on Afghanistan, absolutely, it brought me goosebumps, was so riveting. And yeah, you do get the sense even about Turkey that Turkey, Afghanistan that people there are, like we used to be in India, where any foreigner would come, we would shower them with such hospitality. And I saw the flip side of that from reading your travelogue. But, and one of the things that really I became conscious of is the whole title of this conversation is about South Asia. And yet South Asia was not a concept to me until much longer after I came to the US. I mean, I was from India. And when I came here, my dis-American friend of mine told me, tell people you're from East India because otherwise they would mistake you with the native American in, you know, Indians. So I was an East Indian, I was not a South Asian. And I think South Asia didn't become a term until the 90s, sort of more popular to describe us, you know, our generation of people. And now, but reading your writing, I kind of got in touch with South Asia because that's what South Asia is. Afghanistan is kind of part of South Asia, you know. And so that was interesting to me that your writing gave me a perspective, a kind of a global perspective on South Asia, you know. And that was really amazing. But I also want to ask you about how you came to be so interested in these strangers that you met on your travels. Because I mean, I've traveled a lot too, but you brought such a vivid, such vivid details to the people you encountered and their lives. You were so curious about it. Were you always that way that you were? Well, I didn't know I was until I actually started traveling. And but even today, you know, because I teach travel writing and I know that there's many, many, many different types of travel writing, different genres of travel writing. But I know for me, I'm always interested in people. I like to know what they think, how they live, what they believe, what they care about. And I find that the most fascinating to understand the differences and also the great commonalities that we have with people all over the world. So I'm always interested in a traveler's tales. What I, I often define a traveler's tale, not merely a tale that I tell from my travels, but a tale I've heard on my travels from somebody. And you know, because I like to do a lot of listening, I think that's my entree into entree, I should say, into culture. Yeah, and so that story of the Turkish family who took you to the beach and then went home and then, you know, you had a picnic feast at the beach and then you come home and then you have another feast there. And then this guy sings a song about the daughter of the house who is married to. I was just so, such a rich travesty of the lives. And I could visualize them. I wanted to go to Turkey immediately. Yes, we see, when I talk about the fact that, that Sarita, you and I, we both experienced a pre-globalized society. We, at least I, what I did is that I experienced a society, Turkey for example, Mexico, many, many countries in which the stranger was not a tourist. The stranger was a stranger. And you give shelter to the stranger and you harbor the stranger and make that stranger safe. In fact, in one very small village in the mountains of Turkey that we went to, and I write about this in my book, the people in that village had literally never heard of the United States. They never heard of America. That's how isolated they were. But they knew one thing. They knew we were strangers. They knew that we were not Turks. And so we were taken to this little mosque and there was an announcement made to all the villagers that they were responsible to protect us. And that was absolutely beautiful. They were responsible to feed us, to shelter us and to do everything they could for us because we were strangers. They didn't quite know where we came from. They would say to us, well, who is your king? You know, but that's how it was, you know? Oh, yeah, yeah, as it was. Yeah, I loved the, you know, the Paris Van Life in Paris. By the same, you know, who would have thought? Very interesting. But I do want to ask you another question. Not the humor in your book. For example, when you stayed in that Swiss chalet, you know, and you wrote that one could have stayed in bed in that room, the bedroom there, this beautiful bedroom with this old furniture and stuff. And you said one could have stayed in bed in that room and photographed to travel on. And I thought that was just such a brilliant observation. But where do you get that sort of human sense of humor? Is it from your family or? Well, my dad had a great sense of humor. I mean, he had a corny sense of humor, but he had a sense of humor. And he had a great joy. His favorite thing in the world was travel. But he couldn't afford to do it until he was 60, you know, because he grew up during the Depression. So I think he passed on that joy of travel to me. And if there's humor that comes out in the book, it's probably because I was so darn happy and really delighting in many of the experiences. I don't think that, I mean, I have written some pieces that are strictly humorous. I think there are touches of humor in this book throughout. But it's very, very important to have those pieces, those touches are really valuable, you know, because I mean, here you are, you know, you never talk about the difficulties you must have had while you were camp, basically camping, sleeping in your van most of the time. And yet you're in areas where the climate is not so kind or, you know, whatever. And you don't talk about that as much. And so it's very interesting to me. Well, I think part of that, Sarita, and I think you'll relate to this. And I'm sure some of the members of the audience relate to this is that when we're young, we don't really feel that uncomfortable. You know, you can sleep on someone's floor, you go to their house, you crash in their pad, basically. That's how it was. I mean, and you know, your body's different. And so you put up with a lot of discomfort simply because that's the price you pay for seeing the world. I'm not willing to do that anymore at my age. I like my comforts. But in those days, you know, I mean, I'm never washing my hair in the cold water of a gas station in Afghanistan. I mean, that's about as, that's pretty uncomfortable right there. But was it worth it? Yeah, yeah, it was worth it, you know. It's like God. You can't do it now. I wouldn't do it now. Yeah, in New Zealand, I remember we traveled on my second husband and I, we traveled, well, he wasn't my second husband then, but we traveled around on our camping, you know. And we were just like, basically, I had this tent from REI that I had bought, you know, it was like an igloo of a tent. And I learned to put it up in like 30 seconds, literally, because it rains all the time in New Zealand, particularly in the south. That's right. Oh yeah. That's right. In one time, it got so rainy, it was flooded somewhere and we sneaked into a campground to cook some food. Oh yeah. And then we were kicked out of the campground because we didn't have a reservation there. We couldn't get a place, they were full. Well, I know that really, because I write about it in my book, A Camping Illegally in the Middle of Paris. Yeah, so. It is Seventh Irondezmont, you know. You're not allowed to do that, but we did it. I wanted to ask you another question, which I think is really important. And it pertains to something that you quoted Nehru in your memoir. And you said, he said, he was a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere and at home nowhere. And I know when I read the segment of your book in Berkeley, you talked about feeling very out of place there coming from India, that everything was so different, the sort of freedom and the behavior of the young people and everything. I was just wondering whether you still feel out of place. Do you still feel that? Well, I mean, I love Berkeley. I say that in my chapter on Berkeley. I mean, I love Berkeley, but also there was that experience that I had which made me realize that, yeah, like Nehru said, I'm a mixture of the East and the West and don't really clearly belong anywhere. Yeah, I think there was a time in my real life when I went through a difficult psychological struggle, I should say, because I never had any blood relatives in this country. And I was always isolated and at times I felt very alone. And at the same time, I had no intentions of going back to India either. So I think in the end, in this segment that I read about my arranged marriage, I talk about creating a continent of my own, I say when I'm doing the wedding, when my soul kind of took a flight and it bifurcated and I saw myself creating a continent of my own. And I think now I feel like I've achieved that. I made a continent of my own. So I don't feel that feeling that I don't belong or being out of place. I feel like I made connections and communities like the writing communities, when I started to learn Spanish so have a Spanish community, that I belong to. And I have an Indian community also here, people who are more on the margins of society than the mainstream Indians who like, they have to find out how many billions you are. Before it used to be millions, but now you have to be a billionaire before you can be important in among Indian American community. But so I think I flipped that around now. I don't feel that anymore. I long, I get very nostalgic about India, but the India I feel nostalgic about is long gone. It's not there anymore. As far as I feel, you know that. I know we want to open it up to some questions from the audience, but I just had one last question that just popped into my mind. And that is that, I also work in the high tech industry and I've worked in the high tech industry ever since the late 80s. And of course there's such an influx now of Indians in the software industry or who are in very high leadership positions in the high tech industry. And I was wondering whether this influx of Indians that has come about because of Silicon Valley has made you feel a little bit more at home or has made people more knowledgeable or aware of India? I think that's true. Don't know if it's made me more feel more at home. I see a lot of Silicon Valley people as like a different universe. It's a different universe, yeah. I mean, I have some, I have a close friend who I went to college with who always worked in the Silicon Valley. So I have that connection there. But as far as, yeah, I mean, I think, yes and no. I mean, I think I'm not as exotic as I was when I first came to Berkeley, you know. Right, right. And that's definitely not the case anymore because there are a lot of Indians, particularly in the South Bay, but I have sort of mixed feelings about that, and I have some Indian friends here who live around here where I live around near Berkeley and who have, say, gotten divorced and got married to an American guy or something. And they kind of share some of my sentiments in the sense that we feel like we're not totally accepted by the Indian community in South Bay necessarily. But at the same time, having more of us does make us more mainstream. So it's kind of hard to compute these feelings, but anyway, so I don't know if we have any questions. Yeah, I'm gonna look at the chat and see. I don't see it. Oh, somebody wrote, how has your travel changed with age? I think I kind of answered that. I need my comforts. You don't go around with a van, huh? An unheated van and the dead of winter, too. They had no heater. No, no, I like my comforts. Here's one for you, Sarita. Is that a question for me? Yeah. What is it? Oh, what do you feel are the biggest misconceptions that Americans have about India and Indian people, both in India and in the US? Well, you know, that's a very good question because when I first came here and even though I am a critic of India myself, the only questions I would get about India and the media at that time was so biased against India. So the only things they talked about were untouchables, snake charmers, and the caste system. That's it. And the bright burning. Oh, that was the other one. Sati, you know? The women still jump in their husband's pyres after the husband is died. But that was a custom in a small part of India at one time long ago, but people would ask these questions to me and the media would report these things. And it used to drive me nuts because and I kept trying to tell them that, you know, India has the largest population, I believe, of technically educated people in the world. Oh, yes. And also the fact that women have always been a part of that. I mean, there are many, many women doctors in India at the time and there were few here in the West. So I think those are the things that, and that's one of the reasons that prompted me to do my writing, you know, commentaries, operas because I wanted to educate people about India. It's a complex place. It's not one or the other. And I think Americans try to either sort of, you know, stereotype it as all men are, you know, beating their wives. I mean, I have some Latino friends, you know, from Peru or whatever, my Spanish group. And they were asking me, they were going to India on a tour and they said, oh, the Indian men, do they beat their wives? So it's a complicated society. And I think people tend to have a simplistic view of it. So anyway, somebody asked me, do I show my art anywhere? No, not really, only in my own house. I made some cards and I wanted to sell them to the Oakland Museum, but I never got around to it. You know, greeting cards with my paintings. So that would be lovely. Well, you can put, I wonder if you could put one of your watercolors in your memoir, have a combination. Yeah, except I don't talk about the places that the watercolors, maybe in the epilogue. Yeah. And then there's a question here for both of us. What is the most interesting place each of you have visited? Wow. That's a very challenging question for both of us, I think, right? You wanna take a... Every place is interesting, just in a different way, right? Yeah. For me, there are so many. I mean, I went to Guatemala and I stayed with families, you know? And Guatemala at that time, I think this was around 2008 or something like that. I think it was just coming out of there, the conflicts for many years, Civil War or whatever. And where Westerners were visiting there, but so I stayed with these families and then I went to Lake Atitlam by myself on a bus and then took this boat across the lake to this little village and stayed there. And I met all these European youngsters, you know, young people and we were socializing and going to dinner at their hostel or whatever. And it was really fun. And then I went to up north, I took a flight and I went to the north part of Guatemala and stayed with the Maya family. And that was absolutely really interesting. Yeah, so I did all these, I did it by myself, you know? I had asked a friend if she wanted to go, but she didn't want to. And then she kept apologizing to me afterwards saying, oh, I'm sorry I didn't come with you. And I said, I thought to myself, you know, actually I'm glad that I was alone because when you're alone your senses are directed outside. And so you gain a lot more of the experience of being in a place like I went, you know, to this northern part of Guatemala called, a town called San Jose and there was a big lake there. And I tried to swim there and it was such a big lake that there like ocean like waves in it. And I was having difficulty in it. And then there was this young man who was there and he helped me out, you know? And then he said he was a soccer player. I used some famous soccer player who came there from another country and he invited me to a soccer match. So I was kind of, that's what I cherished. But what about you? What's the most- Well, I agree. And actually in the last several years, well, actually the last 20 years I've traveled a lot solo. I've gone to numerous countries completely by myself. It just, I love the feeling of just landing in a place and, you know, binding out what's there. Recently I went to Uzbekistan and which I absolutely loved. But I love the solo travel. There's no compromise. You don't have to negotiate anything with anybody and you can just do whatever you want. And I find that I'm more garrulous and I talk to people more and make friends when I'm solo. So I like that. I just love it. I- Don't you feel lonely at night and stuff like in the evening for dinner time or something? No, no. And actually I, well, recently I went to, you know, I went to Istanbul by myself in October and there was another woman traveling solo by herself who was about my vintage. And so we would do our separate things in the day and then meet up in the evening. And that was lovely. I always meet people. So even if I'm by myself, I love to be an observer, you know, maybe as part of being a writer. So I like to watch people. Yeah. And so, yeah, there's another question here. Who's writing about place inspires you and your work? And I just take that quickly. I'm a big fan of some of the, I wanna say older travel writers. I don't mean that they're older. I mean past travel writers. I love the writing about place, I love the writing about Africa. For example, the work of Beryl Markham, Westwood the Night, Isaac Denison's Out of Africa. Her descriptions, both of those women, their descriptions of Africa are so beautiful. They give you this incredibly strong and lyrical sense of place. I like some of the writers that were in their early 20s or late 19th century, Freya Stark is one that comes to mind. You know, I think unfortunately, a lot of travel writing has become, as people say, they've become lists, you know, like the 10 best destinations in the world or the 15 hotels you must stay in. And so I never was that kind of travel writer. I like to write more evocative pieces that read a little bit more like short stories. And so I like to read writers who write like that. Yeah, yeah, me too. You know, I was interesting because the second time I went to Paris, I had a friend who was staying there and I stayed with her in a suburb of Paris, but then she was going to grad school and she was very busy. So I spent a lot of time around France by myself, but around particularly around Paris. So I would always have my little laptop and I would go to cafes and I'd sit there. And I was really honest, having a moveable feast, you know, and it just was really moving piece of writing to me, you know, as far as being in a place. And he mentioned certain places around Paris and I actually went to those places where he had been, you know, the area. I've been to so many places, almost every place you go to in Paris, they'll tell you that anyway. Like the area I lived in, you know, in an apartment, I went there. Yeah, so that was kind of interesting, you know, to read about when I went to the Pyrenees. That was another interesting thing. In the Spanish Pyrenees, I went there for a writing residency by myself, of course. And I was reading about, who was that English writer who was there during the Spanish Civil War? You know, Jesus, now it's on the tip of my tongue. But this place, this village was up in the National Park. Well, Hemingway was there. Hemingway was there, but this is another guy. Okay. For a famous author, but I'm forgetting his name on it to look it up and post it. But anyway, he, you know, in that area where I was, it was inside the National Park, the Pyrenees National Park. But in fact, there are these little villages there and stone buildings and stuff. And there are still villages and houses where there's damage from the Spanish Civil War. You know, the cannons or whatever, the artillery that caused damage is still there. It was in this historical place. And I was reading about this guy who went there to help the Spanish. There was then his description of the Spanish people I found are the Catalans rather, which don't consider themselves as Spanish by the way. They are totally a different culture. But, you know, his humorous comments on those people, really, I was observing them. I was living with these people and they refused to, I speak Spanish, right? But they refused to speak Spanish with me because they're so nationalistic. They wanted to see what Catalan. I said, this is ridiculous. I can't speak Catalan. Anyway, that was an interesting. One of the audience members. Oh, that's it. Oh, well, yes. Somebody, thank you. Yes. Yeah, go ahead. What were you saying? No, I think that was it. I don't know if there's any more questions. I think we've answered all the questions. So, well, Serita, I think this has been fantastic. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And I hope everybody has some fun like the two of us did. We had a lot of fun. That was really fun. All right, last questions, audience. I'm still monitoring the chat. But otherwise, thank you both. This was really a fantastic conversation and I can't wait to read both of your work. Yeah, thank you. And so fun. How do we access the recording? Because a few people asked me about that. People who couldn't be here. Yeah, we'll send you the link. And you said, I will get that link to you from our YouTube channel. That would be great, yeah. Actually, all viewers can view it on YouTube right now. Right after this, if they want. And for the other viewers, I'm gonna put the links in for tonight's doc and you can get all those authors that were spoke about at SFPL. Yeah, right. Perfect. Thank you. I'll send you the link too. Thanks, everybody. Don't forget to come back on August 9th. Do I have that right? I'm sorry. It's August 8th for our next broader night. Thanks, everybody.