Leo Tolstoy once wrote, "All happy families are the same." He must have been joking. Either that or he never heard about the Grashows of Brooklyn, N.Y. and their wildly different stories of the year they spent in India.

Man’s Voice:

I was due for a half-year sabbatical and the last second, I decided to apply to teach in India. And low and behold, a month later the New York City Board of Education said, “Go ahead.”

Woman’s Voice:

It was at that point that our daughter laid down on the floor and said her life was over and she wasn’t going.

Girl’s Voice:

I started to cry because I got so scared. I didn’t even know where it was on the map. My brother waved them away, you know, like “Let me take care of this.” And he did.

Young Man’s Voice:

Well, I told her she’d never have to take piano lessons again if she went. I knew that.

Woman’s Voice:

We all needed shots. We needed school records.

Young Man’s Voice:

In some ways it was so quick, though, I didn’t know what classes I would be taking, whether we would live in a big house, what the food was like, you know. Whether we would travel around ...

Woman’s Voice:

We didn’t know how our lives would be in India. We had fantasies and some things come true and of course, as always, you can’t always anticipate everything.

[Music begins]

Girl’s Voice:

When we arrived after I think it was a 48-hour trip. It was really sort of an attack on the senses. All of a sudden there were cows and cucumber carts and watermelon sellers and people on bikes and really very few traffic rules that people follow.

Man’s Voice:

What they did is they found us an apartment and it was an amazing apartment, but one of the best things about it was we had an unobstructed view to the horizon. We’d get up in the morning and there was that sun. It would come up and you could almost feel the entire planet rolling towards the sun. And it was extraordinary. We would watch all of India kind of go down the street – funeral processions, people going to work, people in trucks and oxen.

Woman’s Voice:

No television, no radio, no telephone. And it was amazing to watch the children develop ways of amusing themselves. We had family card games. They would create bowling games out of pairs of socks rolled up.

Girl’s Voice:

I think I’d feel bad for Alex. He was a fourteen year old boy sharing a room with his ten year old sister, but the thing is that Alex and me had been close all the way through so we still spent a lot of time together, which was my fear that we would get out there and he’d make tons of friends.

Woman’s Voice:

Everything is different. Everything is different.

[Vocal music starts]

Mark and I went off to the market and I came back and had only found one vegetable that looked familiar and had to wash all of the vegetables in potassium permanganate, purified water, rinse them again and then dry every string bean. This was going to be my life in India! And there was the one night when I first sat down and just cried and said, “What have we done? What am I doing here? Am I crazy?”

Girl’s Voice:

As a ten year old, I think the last thing I wanted to do is stick out and all of a sudden we were the rich Americans and that really took me by surprise.

Young Man’s Voice:

We went to a middle school – it was an Indian school – and I was almost a foot taller than almost anyone in the entire region, so not only was I white and American, but I was a foot and a half taller at that point. It was a funny time for me [laughs].

Woman’s Voice:

When we got there and he finally wrote to his friend at the age of thirteen he wrote and said “Life is very different here. I’m now married with two children.” [laughter]

[Sitar music]

Man’s Voice:

But then came a trip to a bird sanctuary. On the way home, all the kids were crowded into the back of the bus and they started telling stories. And suddenly there was my son mixed in with all these kids from India, telling his story, telling things about himself, listening and he suddenly felt that he was, indeed, a member of this place. From then on, I think things went much easier for him.

Young Man’s Voice:

I had some good friends there and there were some great young flirtatious moments but I didn’t have a girlfriend and I was happy, I think. People weren’t rushing into the girlfriend/boyfriend status that we had here. And I think there was a freedom to sort of be myself more and not have to worry much about who I was.

Man’s Voice:

We went white water rafting for three days on the Trisuli River. We rode elephants and chased rhinoceros.

Girl’s Voice:

We ate with our hands. That was the best part. We would take sauce and rice, anything ... chicken ...

Woman’s Voice:

We took them to ride camels out in the desert ...

Man’s Voice:

We rode horses up to glaciers ...

[Sound of thunder and rain]

Young Man’s Voice:

The first time it rained, after the five months we were there me and my sister went right up the roof in joy and danced around in what was a light drizzle. That was certainly great and a memorable moment.

Woman’s Voice:

But it was always, always a wonderful thing.

[More music]

Young Man’s Voice:

The most depressing thing was coming back afterwards, more than anything else, having had this incredible adventure and then coming back and finding my friends sitting in the same places, doing much of the same thing from before I left.

Girl’s Voice:

I don’t think I realized how much I was going to miss it until they threw us a surprise party at the very end before we left. Friends of my parents threw us all a surprise party and were considerate enough to invite Alex’s and my friends – without our knowledge. I realized how close I’d become to all these people and how we’d built a life there and how much we were going to be missed and how much I’d miss ...

Young Man’s Voice:

Leaving India was awful. I mean it really was. Mostly the fact that I had good friends by the end and I never knew when I would see them again. I was crying. My life had been very rich and new every day.

Girl’s Voice:

I think India cemented us in a way that has changed our relationship even today. We had this experience where we only had each other.

Young Man’s Voice:

My sister knows me better than anyone else in the world right now and that’s a great gift to have.

Girl’s Voice:

We had no idea what we were getting into. Who knew where we were going to live or what was going to happen and that we came back in one piece, I think, really delighted us and, I think, made our family feel like a team. That really imbued in me the excitement of travel.

Woman’s Voice:

It enriches you because it gives you other visions and so it changes you when you can realize that you can look at things differently or you can experience things differently and that’s very subtle. It’s not one day you come back and you say you’re a changed person.

Young Man’s Voice:

It transformed me, you know. I have to give it to my kids.

Woman’s Voice:

When I was nineteen I went off to Paris. That was a wonderful, incredibly important experience. Then Mark and I went around the world and that was magic. That was truly a gift. Then, then on the first trip around the world, Mark and I had ridden elephants in Nepal once, at a game preserve and we had said how wonderful it would be to take our children there. When we went to India, those years later, we did. How could anything be better than that, to discover something and then be able to take your children and say, “Here–you can have this too.” But now I can’t wait to see what’s happening next!

[Indian music]

[End of recording]

Transcribed by Bev Sykes