<Begin Segment 31>

AI: Well, it's... as we had talked about briefly before we started the interview, it's really impossible to discuss all the things that you already wrote about in your book. When you, when you left, that was, the date was April 20, 1995, and you wrote how you first went back to see your parents and some of your relatives, and that you spent some time in Kerala.

PJ: Right.

AI: And I was wondering, had you been back very much before that, to visit?

PJ: I had. I had gone back a lot. At least once a year, really, we'd go back and visit. And then while I was working at PATH, I went back a lot; sometimes I would go back a couple of times a year for my work. But it's very different, you know, my parents live in a fairly affluent section of Bangalore, and we travel a certain way when I'm traveling with them. Lot of times I would go just to visit them, and I wouldn't really travel around. I've seen more of India in some ways than they have. And so it was very, very different, and my father, in particular, had such a hard time -- both of them, my mother as well, they were so worried. They said, "What, why are you doing this? It's dangerous and why don't you just stay with us in Bangalore?" And I would say, "No, that's not the point." And so they were very concerned about the idea -- I actually had the resources from the fellowship to live fairly well, and I think I lived well compared to the people that I was working with. But compared to what my parents wanted for me or what I could have done, of course, I was living in this tiny little apartment that had no hot water, and I went through that when I wrote about the birth of my son. Just, I mean, living in villages a lot, but that was the whole point, and I still feel like I actually didn't immerse myself as fully as I could have. But it was, it was really a phenomenal experience, and I think that there were many ways I could have done that, but this was something that... I was trying very hard to replicate what life in a village would be like, or life, sort of, in a small town would be like, knowing that I always had the resources to get out, which immediately fundamentally changes the experience. But that's what I was trying to, to do, is just to understand, from a work perspective, but also from my own perspective, all of the issues around classism and caste and Indian society and the things that I had really struggled with around women's issues and how women are portrayed and how Indian women are portrayed. I just felt like I wanted to have a chance to look at all of that without working in it, 'cause work makes you focus, and I wanted to be disparate in what I did.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.