The Ambassador, the President, and Me: an Unlikely Reunion in India

When Santi Elijah Holley, writer and author of An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created, was 25, he took the ultimate travel leap of faith: He hitchhiked 400 miles from Northern California to Portland through small-town Oregon.

Transcript

Charmaine Craig: This is the story of an unlikely friendship between a president, an ambassador, and a writer (that’s me!). It’s also a story of time (and timing) and place. And, like many stories, it starts with a chance encounter.

Aislyn Greene, host: That’s Charmaine Craig, author of three novels, including Miss Burma, where Charmaine touched on her family’s roots in India. I’m Aislyn Greene, and in our last episode of Travel Tales by Afar, Charmaine reveals how a new friend, an unexpected reunion—and a dash of serendipity—helped her connect more deeply with her roots . . . and ultimately, so much more. Now, onto Charmaine’s chance encounter.

Charmaine: Midway through the dinner where we first met, my daughter’s best friend’s mother interrupted me to demand, “Wait, what’s your name?”

Her name was Superna, she ran a global television network, and, for the second time that evening, I introduced myself to her, adding something about how my name (Charmaine) had presented challenges to people all my life. In second grade, for instance, packs of boys routinely chased me while chanting, “Don’t squeeze the Charmin—”

“—I know you,” Superna interrupted me. And then—after I speculated about the ways we might have crossed paths given her line of work and the fact that, well, our teenage daughters had attended the same school for years—“No. I KNOW you.”

And she proceeded to explain that—a third of a century before, when I was 18 and she was 19—I’d come down to Columbia University to visit my then boyfriend, Eric, one of her college friends. Apparently, he’d invited her to join us at a museum, where I had ogled a Klimt, and he’d had eyes only for me. “You were sweet,” Superna said. Clearly, she had the superior memory, because I was drawing a blank.

“I’m still in touch with him,” she went on about our mutual friend.

In another cosmic turn of events, Eric (whom Superna had met in Hindi class at Columbia) had recently been nominated to serve as U.S. Ambassador to India. Add to this the interesting tidbit that when he and I were BFFs back in high school—before we’d ever started dating—we often hung out in my room, where the only map on display was a line drawing of India. In childhood, I’d heard the story of one of my distant relatives arriving in 10th-century India to save the life of a local ruler’s son. The ruler, or so the legend goes, granted this relative and his descendants indefinite privileges in his territory, near what is now Kochi. Those privileges were etched onto copper plates, eventually housed in the Kochi synagogue constructed by family members in the 15th century. Still, by the time Eric and I would hang out in my room, I sensed that my yearning to know India couldn’t be explained merely by family lore or bloodlines.

At the dinner, I told Superna that I was also in touch with Eric, but the truth was he and I had met up hardly more than a handful of times through the decades. I blamed myself for that. Sometime after we’d embarked on a long-distance arrangement as early collegegoers (maybe as soon as a few weeks after that forgotten first meeting with Superna), he and I had broken up, and heartbreak had caused me to rebuff his early efforts to reconnect as friends. Then, as far as a return to close friendship went, it had seemed to be too late.

Though not according to Superna. “I was born in Delhi,” she announced before we parted ways that night. “When Eric becomes ambassador, we’re going.”

By the time Superna texted me to say that she’d booked her ticket to Delhi and suggested I join her, 18 months had passed. Our daughters were now entering their second year in college, and she had stepped down as president of the network. Yet a president, former or not, must lead, and the timing of her trip—during the final weeks of my summer break from teaching—compelled me to want to follow her.

Then there was the kindness that Eric had shown me during the early months of his tenure as ambassador, when he’d visited the Kolkata synagogue where my maternal great-grandfather had once served as rabbi. “Come find your roots!” he’d messaged me.

In retrospect, I’m not sure if the president or the ambassador exerted more influence over the shape that our trip began to take. Our president set up a group email thread. Eric thought he might be able to travel with us briefly. The question was where. “I know Kolkata is important to Charmaine,” he wrote.

“We need to make this a mission to retrace her family’s history in Kochi,” Superna countered.

Superna’s high aptitude for achievement made her determined to accomplish more than just seeing the sights. And, as I was learning, she held a sincere interest in unearthing more about my familial history in India, something I touch on in Miss Burma, my second book and, or so she said, Superna’s “second favorite novel” (she’s not one for hyperbole).

“I’ve done a little family research,” I replied, pushing back, “and it seems my two living relatives in Kochi are recluses and people-avoidant.” I wasn’t lying (even if similar qualities made me all at once desperate not to have the trip revolve around me). My cousin had told me that those relatives, literally the two last Jews of Kochi, would never see me.

When I shared this with the group, Eric responded: “Nothing like having a seven-car motorcade show up to knock on your door! (JK.)”

Or was he?

Time is strange. From a certain vantage point, we three were strangers to each other, having spent 35 years almost entirely apart. Yet, from another perspective, we were returning to a point of origin, closing a loop. And that made the impression of our strangeness to each other (not to mention the impression of time’s strict linearity) seem less persuasive. It also made it much easier to acquiesce. And so it was decided: Superna and I would join Eric for three days.

In Delhi, we boarded a plane bound for Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, along the fertile Malabar coast, where Jewish people began to settle as far back, perhaps, as two millennia ago.

Fittingly, our first trek there (yes, by seven-car motorcade!) was to a museum. Set on the lush grounds of one of India’s oldest zoological gardens, the Naipur is rich in archeologically and regionally significant artifacts. Yet if back in the day, during our first museum visit together, I’d gawked at the work before me, now I joined Superna in observing the direction of Eric’s gaze. At every turn, he was greeted by staff and local figures; and, at every turn, he shone with presence, openness, heartfelt interest, and goodwill.

“He’s good at his job,” Superna remarked, with her penchant for understatement. We seemed to be seeing our old friend through the eyes of the girls we’d been, girls who had known him to be kind and capable, yet who hadn’t been able to glean how he would make good on that outsized heart and capacity. It felt as though, in a single moment, we could see someone we’d once known well in a new light and across time.

At Villa Maya, located in a modernized ammaveedu [residence] of one of the local maharaja’s wives, the three of us started catching up over a sumptuous lunch of local dishes. And my sense of our being with one another as if on two planes, past and present, continued into the night, when we stayed up late in a bar overlooking the Arabian Sea, buzzed not on alcohol—we didn’t need that intoxicant—but on something that can arise when one travels away from the familiar or toward the forgotten: a gaining of distance on a habitual way of seeing and being. As the waves slurped up against the red cliffs beneath us, we traded stories about our memories and lives.

On the one hand, we’d had such different trajectories, mine more insular and materially modest. Yet we’d all had long marriages; we were all parents; we all had been professionals since our graduate school years; and we all shared a sense that bonds between us had obscurely shaped our trajectories.

Maybe because I began to see myself through their eyes, past and present, I found myself speaking rawly about my hardship in marriage and my reasons for having stayed in it, reasons that Eric and Superna soberly, tenderly took in before trying to counsel me. And maybe because Eric could see that I was in special need of both insight and blessings, he urged us to follow through on our plans to journey to a sacred spot at the southernmost tip of the country before daybreak.

At 4 a.m. the next morning, Superna and I were woken by cyclonic howls of wind and rain. As we staggered up to meet Eric, we found ourselves wading through pools of water encroaching into our room, pools that seemed to be still more evidence of the illusiveness of boundaries—between the outer and the inner, the dreaded and the longed for, the remembered and the anticipated.

For two hours, we drove through darkness and lessening rains toward Kannyakumari, where three major bodies of water converge—the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea. Then, still in relative darkness, we emerged onto waves of people on the craggy shore, all waiting to experience the benediction of sunrise in this place.

I hadn’t known yet that women often come here to pray to the goddess Kanya Kumari, who was to marry Shiva before he failed to appear at their wedding. Nor did I know that the 135-foot statue rising from a pedestal out at sea, of the poet Valluvar, suggests that love must be built on a foundation of virtue.

At the shoreline, Eric greeted the children and mothers around us, while Superna held back, as if waiting for something. I heard Eric tell us—or only me?—that it was a blessing to wade into the water here at first light. Then the sky above the water began to flush with dawn, and . . .

A sensation. A sort of hook under my ribs. A feeling of being drawn forward, of being compelled, not just toward the unknown, the infinite, but back to my deceased mother and aunties, hovering somewhere beyond the horizon.

Then a question, coming not quite from my lips, but from my soul, and addressed to my ancestors and the gods and goddesses I could not name.

Help me, show me the way to rid myself of this pain I’ve been carrying . . .

In his book The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli discusses the relationship between point of view, memory, and reality. He also discusses time in light of change. At a certain point, considering the matter of entropy, he writes of a piece of wood that it “does not start to burn on its own. It remains for a long time in a state of low entropy, until something opens a door that allows it to pass to a state of higher entropy. . . . This something might,” he goes on, “be a match to light a flame. The flame is a process that opens a channel through which the wood can pass into a state of higher entropy.”

Superna says she “doesn’t do emotion,” though you’d never guess that from the gleam in her eyes when, on the next day of our trip, we connected with my reclusive relatives whom we were never supposed to meet: Keith, the younger of the last two Jews of Kochi, who spent time with us at the Paradesi Synagogue, where those 10th-century copper plates continue to shine; and Queenie, the elder of my relatives, who welcomed us in her home and would pass out of her existence there some 10 months later.

Was my decision to pass out of my own long state of low entropy in marriage—a decision I’d made by the time I turned from the water I’d waded into in Kannyakumari—an outcome of a channel my friends had opened in me, one that reached as far back as our youth? Was it an outcome of the match they lit when they determined to burn away the distance between my longing to know India and my return to that ancestral homeland?

What I know is that Superna and Eric compelled me to see the reality of my present from the perspective of the youths we’d been.

What I know is that my new reality—as someone who could conceive of herself as liberated from her long pain in marriage—began at that moment, in Kannyakumari, because my friends were standing there, on that shore with me.

Aislyn: And that was Charmaine Craig. Charmaine did follow through on that decision she made while wading into the waters at Kannyakumari. She left her marriage and she began a new chapter. Eric wrapped up his term in India in 2025, and the president, the ambassador, and the writer remain in close touch.

And you can learn more about Charmaine and her work, including her novels, Miss Burma and her latest, My Nemesis, at charmainecraig.com. I’ve included that link in our show notes.

Thank you so much for joining this final episode of Travel Tales by Afar’s sixth season. We’ll be back in 2026 with more stories of journeys that change us. Until then, safe travels. 

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