Cloud Messenger: Love and Loss in the Indian Himalayas

by Karen Trollope-Kumar

Overview

As a Canadian medical student, Karen Trollope-Kumar went to India to study social and preventive medicine and met a young pediatrician named Pradeep. His dream of working in the Himalayan foothills captured her imagination, and the man captured her heart. They married in a Hindu wedding ceremony and pledged to share a life of service and spiritual growth.
In this poignant, heartwarming, and gently humorous memoir, Karen recounts an eleven-year chapter of their unusual lives. She and Pradeep worked as medical doctors in the Himalayas, first in a rural hospital and later in remote mountain villages. When disaster struck - an assassination, an earthquake, a political crisis - their ideals, their safety, and their relationship are put at risk.
The Cloud Messenger is a story of adventure and idealism, culture and medicine, faith and love, and it raises enduring questions: How can we cross religious and cultural boundaries? What happens to our dreams in the face of danger and disillusionment? And when dreams diverge, when one spouse can no longer continue on a certain path, what path do we choose?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781460287705
Publisher:	FriesenPress
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

Karen Trollope-Kumar studied medicine at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. In her fourth year of medical studies she met her future husband, Pradeep, on a student visit to Lucknow. After graduation, she worked as a family physician in Thunder Bay before moving to India to marry the man she loved. They have two adult children, Sonia and Raman, who spent their early childhood in India.
After returning to Canada in 1996, Karen completed a PhD in medical anthropology, the study of health in its social and environmental context. She worked as a family physician in Hamilton and also became actively involved in medical education at McMaster University. She currently works as a family physician at the Grand River Community Health Centre in Brantford, Ontario. She and Pradeep spend part of every year in Dehradun, India, where they lived and worked early in their married life.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2017-03-07
A Canadian doctor in India finds romance and a fraught quest for professional and personal fulfillment in this debut memoir. The author was a young medical student when she traveled to India in 1981 and met Pradeep Kumar, a soulful pediatrician; after a four-year, long-distance courtship, she married him and returned to India to live there. The couple dreamed of practicing medicine among the impoverished villagers in the Himalayan province of Garhwal, and they did so at two ashram-run charitable health programs. But the dream became a nightmare when an autocratic ashram leader aroused local opposition—a situation that eventually resulted in someone's death. Trollope-Kumar's multifaceted memoir offers an adventurous fish-out-of-water narrative, showing how she struggled to learn Hindi and adjust to India's vibrant, chaotic culture with its constant noise and bustle. She also encountered corruption—her request for a re-entry document prompted an investigation into whether she was a CIA agent, until a suitable bribe smoothed things over—as well as deformed beggars, street elephants, colorful rituals, and intrusive etiquette. She also delivers a love story, telling how she and Pradeep negotiated their evolving relationship, especially after Pradeep immersed himself in Hindu spirituality, which she sometimes found hard to fathom. In addition, the book is a fascinating anthropological study of clashing Western and Indian cultural perspectives on health and illness; for example, village midwives smiled at the author's germ theory of neonatal tetanus, then patiently explained that it was really caused by evil spirits. Finally, it documents a journey of self-discovery as the author's and Pradeep's happy success at setting up rural health centers turned to dismay as they fell apart, and then to depression and a rethinking of goals. Trollope-Kumar's prose is evocative throughout; of her deepest melancholy, she writes, "The world around me was like a black-and-white photograph—the colour had disappeared, leaving nothing but shades….This stark world of angles, planes, and lines." In this luminous memoir, she captures both India's charm and its deep poverty and squalor without ever succumbing to exoticism, and she renders the people she encounters with sensitivity and insight. A vivid saga of a woman who found an enthralling new home.

Kirkus Reviews