About the Book

He was on a death-defying mission. She was burdened with social taboos. They were the inheritors of this eternal love story. Michael Genin was a second lieutenant with the US Army Air Forces Air Transport Command, placed in Assam, India in 1941-43. He was also a musician. He is now in his nineties, a very sprightly person, living in California. He is suddenly reconnected with his past, thanks to the internet. In Assam, Michael encountered Indian Vaishnava music. Also a river, the great Brahmaputra, perhaps a bit like the great Mississippi, listening to a young American musician as a half moon climbed high and the husnahanna flowered. When Michael was tired of Assam, he went down to Calcutta by the tea trains, just to be able to play for the Calcutta Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was later burnt down. This is a story of a time when American soldiers introduced ice cream to India and took back the Song of India. It is also a great American-Indian love story that straddles time and transcends into 2016. It is old-fashioned romance, old-fashioned music that is a part of modern America’s story and becomes a part of modern India’s story too. 

About the Author

Papri Sen Sri Raman is a journalist-writer and translator. She is the winner of the third UNHCR C-NES Media Fellowship, 2008; Interpress Media Fellowship in 2008-09; The Kaiser Media Fellowship in 2007-08. She has worked with several Indian newspapers like The Statesman, The Indian Express and the IANS news agency and writes for Women’s Feature Service, SciDev.Net and Truthout news agencies, Current and Outlook Traveller.  A contributing writer for several books, including  Across the Crossfire: Women in Conflict, India Idea, The Indian Woman and is writer-editor of the autobiography of a street child, Basu Rai: From the Streets of Kathmandu. She has also translated two wonderful Bengali books into English, The Shaal Forest and The Magic Bones, many moons ago. Papri's first love is poetry, she is also an artist and loves to read and travel. With a Master's degree in Life Sciences, History and crime fiction interest her.