World as Family A Journey of Multi-Rooted Belongings by Vishakha N. Desai

 World as Family

A Journey of Multi-Rooted Belongings by Vishakha N. Desai is one of the best memoirs I read this year. Simply clear, sincere, I firstly met online mrs Desai as moderator during a symposium organized by Columbia University Press on Covid-19 and vaccines: now we both follow each other on Instagram.

Born in Ahmedabad, India, in a family with seven other siblings, parents involved in the profound changes started by Gandhi, with which the father of Desai, journalist, worked with, Vishakha discovered an intellectual and fertile environment. She studied with success in exclusive schools and at the age of 17 her father encouraged her: spending a year in the USA would have been exciting. Vishakha hadn't never left her family, her loved siblings, the connections she had established, the new boyfriend she had, her dancing classes. How could she live well in a different distant country, with a foreign language, different customs, the idea of speaking 24 hours per day just American/English, eating different food, and living a different existence?

It hasn't been a simple choice, but Vishakha, also thanks to another friend interested in the program by the AFS, sent the application. Vishakha was accepted like also her friend and both of them left India for good: that one was their first intercontinental trip. They could not sleep for the excitement, and once arrived in New York City they admired the magnificent skyline. Vishakha was later directed to Santa Barbara where an adorable new family, the Reeds one, would have followed her during the year. New food, at first it was a weird world, a weird school, with weird students with their weird questions on drugs, but as also adds Vishakha, this experience, a complete full-immersion in another culture gradually changed her perspective of the world because these experiences open new horizons and let us think differently. 

She noticed this, when her father stopped by there, invited by the AFS: Vishakha saw him as a provincial man if compared with the people she met in a daily base in Santa Barbara. 

Simply: Vishakha was discovering other realities, more complicated and more different from her own existence in India, more simple and protected.

Once returned home the adaptation was not simple because Vishakha in the USA discovered individualism and privacy: the one she could not have in her own house. Also her accent at first appeared weird: and plus...Smells, perfumes of her own land appeared much more accentuated, and strange: was she noticing this because of her trip to the USA?

Vishakha changed, stopping to consider herself just a citizen of India but of a more big world, that included the USA.

In the while she fell in love for an American soldier, Tom, although their relationship, with a marriage celebrated in India, didn't continue once in the USA.

The end of it was reason of sadness, but Vishakha, who had also decided for an abortion in the while, because she was building her own career, became a name in the field of Indian art. She started to collaborate with prestigious realities and museums, ending in the MFA, Museum of Fine Arts of Boston where she worked with success for several years, before to start another adventure in New York City.

She found in Robert the companion of her existence, while she assisted at the degradation of health of her beloved parents, in particular her father, with a diagnosys of Parkinson.

When she married Robert, her father could not attend the wedding; after a while he suffered of a massive stroke. Vishakha tells that most of her family, now in the USA was hyper-busy and could not stay at long in India: at the same time, after three weeks of choma her father died.

Oh; Vishakha remembers the joy when she started to work at the MFA of Boston, receiving the visit of her parents; in particular her father was intrigued by the city where Gandhi studied in and he loved to search for all the places where he had been, and what influenced him giving coverage to this visit in a regular basis in the magazine where he was writing for; the popularity of Gandhi needed to be remarked in fact. 

I loved a lot the description of Vishaka's parents's second house in India with ten rooms plenty of books and statues of different divinities, a big garden and the fertile intellectual activity breathed everywhere.

But...What is World as Family? And when can we consider the world as a family? I personally consider the world as a family where I am accepted and loved and appreciated; it can be in my close or distant world/connections. 

Vishakha found that the integration or her being Indian didn't change the fact that she was an American citizen:that her world as family can be in India, but also in other parts of the world. 

An important chapter is dedicated to the current COVID-19 pandemics with reflections on economy, social injustices and discriminations in the world.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori