Necessary Ports - Softcover

Verna Rudd Kenvin; Kenvin, Roger Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965663566 ISBN 13: 9780965663564

Publisher: July Blue Pr, 2000

Necessary Ports is a witty, vivacious travel memoir based on the youthful adventures of the husband-wife authors in Europe and India. Sailing for Paris on the Queen Elizabethin the 1950s, they hoped for jobs in France, but instead wound up in Switzerland at Le Rosey, teaching students from twenty-two nations, among them the present Duke of Kent and Aga Khan. In the 1960s, they ventured to India under the Fulbright program and found themselves and their two daughters (aged four and five) in the middle of the first India-Pakistan war. Their entertaining adventure story is told in four parts: "Voyage to Byzantium," an account of their trip to Turkey, Greece, and the Ukraine in 1992; "Small War in India," Letters sent home in 1965-66; "Paris Bound," their letters from Europe in 1953-55; and "A Valentine for Brooklyn," three essays and a short story from 1999 paying homage to that often misunderstood metropolis.

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About the Author:

Roger Lee Kenvin is the author of the short story collections Harpo's Garden, Trylons and Perispheres, and The Cantabrigian Rowing Society's Saturday Night Bash, also available through Amazon.com. He is also the author of Krishnalight, a play published in Calcutta, India. Verna Rudd Kenvin is an educator, who, like her husband, has taught in Switzerland and India, as well as in the United States. She is a graduate of Vassar College with a Master's degree in Education from Bank Street College.

As twilight falls, the sunset is very beautiful over the Gomati River, which now takes on a jade-like color. One sees Moghul-style buildings with their onion-shaped domes etched in black silhouette against the amber sky, little lights beginning to flicker on in the distance, a boat or two drifting down the river. All the unpleasantness of the day begins to disappear, so that one can give oneself over completely to night sounds--high-pitched voices intoning strange nasal tunes, the scratching of matches at little fires in charcoal burners along the side of the road, the staccato commands of goatherders driving their flocks home. Everything is close by you at night as you drive home from town in a rickshaw. You can just hear them--even the fortune-tellers prophesying to the hushed, listening, invisible people around them.
--from "Small War in India"

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