My work took me and my family, my wife and three children, to Bombay, India where we lived for two years, 1998 and 1999. This was my first assignment with my new employer and I was flush with the excitement and adventure of being able to live and work in such an exotic, wondrous place. I poured that excitement into many letters to family and friends back home. At first, they were just letters, breathless descriptions of the myriad colorful, aromatic, intense life and humanity that was my experience of India. As time went on the letters became a little more thematic, more essay-like, though hardly less urgent.
A couple of things about these historical documents. First, I wasn’t trying to produce something unified or special. I was just an amazed, wide-eyed kid from Indianapolis soaking in as much of the rich culture and unique experiences as I could, frantically scribbling it down as fast as I could write. These letters were me living literarily without even thinking about it or trying. It simply happened, naturally.
Second, at some point of my sending these letters home readers passed them to others who passed them to still more people. A radio personality in Indianapolis got hold of the letters and read portions of them on the air. I hope they still capture their reader’s imagination.
Third, from the moment thirteen years ago I hit the send button for each of these letters I took no special effort to archive them in either hard or soft copy, foolish not to do for such a large body of work. A year or so after leaving India the computer I wrote them on became unusable with no hope of retrieving any of its files. I was thankful and relieved when I discovered my father had carefully kept hard copies of all the emails. At least they weren’t entirely lost. Imagine my even greater gratitude and relief to discover that dad had somehow kept the soft copy versions even through several years of word processor upgrades and changes and that I was able to open and convert them in a different word processor on a different operating system.
I am going to edit the original letters very lightly. I like the urgent joy and excited wonderment that gripped my life and my pen as I wrote. Also, I will use the name Bombay even though the city’s name was changed even before I moved there to Mumbai. When I was there expatriates still called it Bombay and that is what it shall always be in my memory.
