Learning to Welcome the Stranger Within

When you began in a different world than the one you’re supposed to call home

The author (right) and her mother, Simla, India, 1957

1.

When I was three, my family lived in a house in New Delhi with a rooftop terrace where we slept out in the open on hot summer nights. My first memories are filled with that Indian ocean of stars overhead, the desert sky stretching wide and deep and uncannily quiet around us, and the darkness pungent…