Essays – An American in Kerala

Haunted Tales: Folklore from India to America

We have built civilizations between us, but we have never been able to build a wall high enough to keep out the dark.

A Darkness You Can Feel

A few weeks ago, we went for a night drive along the shadowy roads near our campus. When I say it’s dark, I mean a darkness so complete it’s difficult for most Americans to imagine. The thick canopy of trees swallows every fragment of ambient light.

In that thickness, I noticed something, something that appeared enormous. A pair of glowing eyes and the outline of a huge antler rack floated among the tree trunks.

Surprisingly, my first thought wasn’t “sambar deer,” though that’s what the creature turned out to be. They roam the roads at dusk and into the night; I’ve seen them plenty of times before. But this time, a chill twisted in my gut, and the word “Wendigo” surfaced in my mind instead.

And this got me thinking. What legends, spirits, and spooks reside in these mountains and forests? Are they too different from the ones I have read about and heard among the Appalachian forests and beyond?

So, this Halloween, let’s wander a little, through the misty mountains and red clay roads of the world, to meet these tales who speak in different languages, but murmur the same human fears.

Let’s meet these tales, one by one…

The Woman Who Walks at Night

In northern India, there is the Churel, a woman wronged in life who returns after death, often seeking vengeance. Her appearance is hideous: backward-facing feet, a black tongue, rough lips, and long, lank hair. But don’t be fooled: she can shapeshift into a beautiful young woman, luring men from lonely roads, then draining them of blood or life. By dawn, her victims are found aged and gray.

Their eternal sorrow becomes a weapon, a force of nature that refuses to be ignored.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Across the world, Mexican and Southwestern communities tell of La Llorona, the “Weeping Woman” who searches for her drowned children by the riverside, calling out to travelers who stray too close. Just hearing La Llorona’s cries means misfortune or death for the unlucky person.

These stories echo the pain of women betrayed and silenced by those who failed them. Their eternal sorrow becomes a weapon, a force of nature that refuses to be ignored.

But the night isn’t the only thing to fear. There are also the hungry…

The Hungry Dead

In Buddhist and Hindu belief, there are the Pretas, which are hungry ghosts, cursed with throats too narrow and stomachs too large to ever be filled. They wander unseen among the living, forever searching and eternally unfulfilled.

…when insatiable greed consumes a person, they are transformed into the very monster they once feared.

Half a world away, among Algonquian peoples of North America, there’s the Wendigo, a spirit consumed by hunger, forever craving human flesh. It roams through the deep winter and forests, possessing unsuspecting humans, including the gluttonous and the starving, and turning them into cannibals.

The lesson is the same across seas and continents: when insatiable greed consumes a person, they are transformed into the very monster they once feared. It is a cautionary tale written in the pangs of an empty stomach.

And then there are the monsters born not from hunger, but from desire…

The Lover’s Curse

In Kerala, the coastal state at India’s southern tip, they tell of the Yakshi, a beautiful woman with jasmine-scented hair and a smile that hides her true nature. She appears at night under palm trees, asking lonely men for company, then drinks their blood.

…these are women who have been made monstrous through the fears and transgressions of men.

Let’s travel to the American South where they have their own deadly spirits. There’s the Boo Hag of Gullah folklore, who slips into sleeping bodies to ride them through the night, draining the person’s life force and causing them to feel exhausted. And then, we’ll find the Deer Woman, told across many Native American nations (and later found in Appalachian lore), who has dual roles as both protector of women and children and terrorizer of men, luring them to their deaths.

The Boo Hag
The Deer Woman

Each is a story where beauty and danger wrap around each other; a lesson (or warning) that desire can be as perilous as fear.

But beneath this surface lies a more ancient, predictable truth: these are women who have been made monstrous through the fears and transgressions of men. They are the reflections of patriarchal anxieties, where female power and sexuality become deadly.

But we don’t always have to travel so far into the past to find things that terrify us…

The Ghost Who Knocks

A door with “Nale Ba” scrawled across it

In the 1990s, a strange panic gripped Bangalore, India. People began to say a witch roamed the streets, knocking on doors at night. She could sound like your mother, your friend, anyone you trusted. If an unlucky soul answered the door, they would be found deceased soon after. The only way to keep her out was to write “Nale Ba” (“Come Tomorrow”) on your door.

The ancient fears that haunted our ancestors in the forest have learned to knock on our urban doors.

It’s eerily close to the more modern American legends like Bloody Mary, whispered at sleepovers, or the Mothman who appeared before disasters. Every age invents its own ghost, and the city’s concrete replaces the forest, but the uneasiness stays the same.

The Nale Ba legend is a terrifying reminder that our modern world is a thin facade. The ancient fears that haunted our ancestors in the forest have learned to knock on our urban doors.

But it’s not only spooks and spirits that can scare us. There are beings that can shapeshift into or imitate humans…

The Shapeshifter’s Secret

From the tomes of Hindu mythology is the Ichchhadhari Nagin. It is a serpent that can become a woman, taking human form mostly to seek revenge if her lover is harmed. She is ancient, divine, and deadly.

…this illuminates the fear of crossing lines between human and animal, good and evil.

To the west, in Navajo tradition, tales of Skinwalkers describe witches who take animal form through forbidden ritual. Misrepresented often in pop culture, they remain one of the most secretive and feared figures in Native belief. They are said to also mimic the voice of loved ones and are even able to possess a human.

Both of these spirits terrify through transformation, and this illuminates the fear of crossing lines between human and animal, good and evil. But they’re also stories about identity and justice: who gets to decide what form is “pure,” and what happens when that line is crossed.

The Universal Language of Fear

Ghost stories are rarely just about ghosts. They’re about the things a culture struggles to name: grief, injustice, hunger, desire, guilt.

That’s why Indian and American folklore can look so alike.

When we tell these stories respectfully, we’re recognizing that all people haunt and are haunted. Every culture gives its dead a voice, and every voice has something to teach the living.

So this Halloween, maybe the scariest thing isn’t what goes bump in the night. Maybe it’s realizing how alike we all are when the lights go out.

We have built civilizations between us, but we have never been able to build a wall high enough to keep out the dark. And in that primordial dark, we all tell the same stories to make sense of what we cannot see.

Etymology of Sugar and Candy: A Sweet Journey

As we are between the festivals of Diwali and Halloween, I thought it would be appropriate to do a shorter etymology post.

Diwali, the Festival of Lights, celebrates the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness. You’ll find homes lined with diyas and lamps, fireworks and sparklers, and lots of sweets.

Halloween, on the other hand, brings a sense of eerie mystery, with costumes, carved pumpkins, and candy capturing the season’s spookiness rather than light and renewal.

But did you notice what these holidays have in common?

Sugar and candy. But where did these sweet words come from? Hidden in the syrup of gulab jamun and beneath the wrappers of Reese’s pumpkins is a fascinating linguistic journey, one that travels across continents and millennia, from ancient India to medieval Europe, carrying the legacy of trade, language, and humanity’s desire for sweetness.

From Sanskrit to Sugar

Before candy bars or kaju katli, there was śarkarā (शर्करा), the Sanskrit word for “ground or granulated sugar.” Originally, śarkarā referred not to refined sugar but to small, gritty pebbles or crystals. As Indians began refining sugarcane juice into crystalline form (a process perfected in the Indian subcontinent over 2,000 years ago) this miraculous sweet substance took on the name śarkarā.

Through centuries of trade along the Silk Road and maritime spice routes, the word śarkarā took on new forms in new languages. In Prakrit, an ancient vernacular in North India, it became sakkarā, which Persian traders adopted as šakar (شکر). The Arabs carried it onward as sukkar (سكر), and medieval Latin scribes recorded it as succarum or zucarum.

By the time it reached medieval Europe, the word had solidified into Old French sucre and Italian zucchero. From there, English borrowed it as sugar in the 13th century.

So the next time you sprinkle sugar into your pumpkin spice latte or stir it into your kheer, remember you’re using a word that began in Sanskrit and traveled the world through trade and culinary innovation. Every grain of sugar is a speck of history, carrying both the memory of ancient India’s language and its ingenuity.

A tldr version of the history of “sugar”

śarkarā -> sakkarā -> šakar (شکر) -> sukkar (سكر) -> succarum -> sucre/zucchero -> sugar

The Story of “Candy”

If sugar is the mother of sweetness, then candy is its offspring. This word also has roots in India, from khaṇḍa (खण्ड), meaning “piece” or “fragment.” When sugar was first crystallized, it often formed into large blocks or shards, which were broken into khaṇḍas, pieces of sweetness.

Persian merchants, who became experts in the sugar trade, adopted the word as qand (قند), meaning sugar or sweet substance. Arabic then transformed it into qandī, meaning “made of sugar.”

This Arabic form found its way into European tongues through the bustling trade of the Middle Ages, first appearing as Italian candito and French candi (as in sucre candi, “crystallized sugar”). By the 14th century, English had adopted the word as candy.

The original “candied” goods were fruits or nuts preserved in sugar, luxury items fit for nobles and festivals. Over time, as sugar became more widely available, candy came to mean any sweet confection. And by the 20th century, it had taken on its modern association: the sugary bounty of Halloween night.

A tldr of “candy”

khaṇḍa (खण्ड) -> khaṇḍas -> qand (قند) -> qandī -> candito/candi -> candy

A Trick and a Treat for the Mind

So when a costumed zombie knocks on your door shouting “Trick or treat!” or your aunty sends you a package of soan papdi, remember that even the word “treat” shares roots with trade and exchange. Sugar and candy are just two of the words (and wonders) we’ve borrowed from India.

Each piece you unwrap or spoonful you dissolve in your tea carries a soft echo of its past: fragments of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic melted together through centuries of travel and taste. Like sugar, language preserves what it touches, crystallizing memory, meaning, and migration into something still on our tongues. Sweet, isn’t it?

Inherited Scripts: Real Lessons from India, Part 3 of 3

This essay concludes a series on India Syndrome, Orientalism, and spirituality seeking in India. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Bigger Than Ourselves

I moved to India with zero expectations, no desires for spiritual awakenings or anything of that sort. And thirteen years later, I’m still here because this is where my child was born, where my neighbors know my name and my sense of humor, where the routines have become mine. I am not wandering from ashram to ashram or following any grand calling other than life itself. But I have changed nonetheless.

My transformation arrived in delivery rooms, crowded markets, long queues, and building a life far from the culture I grew up in. The miracle of India, I’ve learned, lives less in Himalayan peaks and more in the ordinary, in showing up day after day for the slog, but most of all, for people.

Still, from a distance, I can recognize the hunger that brings so many travelers to India. The ones who arrive with notebooks, Instagram reels, and expectations of sudden insight. In the U.S., where I grew up, so many of the places that once held people together have frayed. Church pews are emptying. Neighborhoods exist where people barely know each other. Even restaurants and parks feel quieter. Life often takes place inside private boxes: house, car, office, gym. Even leisure feels like something that is purchased. In that emptiness, it makes sense that people book yoga retreats or chase India as an idea. They want something communal and bigger than themselves. That longing isn’t wrong. It’s very much human.

Outward Journeys, Inward Work

And yet, longing can be deceiving. A retreat or a trek can feel like transformation…until you’re home again, facing the same routines you left behind. The truth is, you can’t import change. A trip might shake you awake, but the work of growth is slower and more ordinary.

For me, it came in small doses: learning patience when I didn’t understand what was happening, finding empathy in a language I couldn’t quite follow, and building a safety net out of friends, neighbors, and aunties. The lessons didn’t arrive in a clap of thunder; rather, they blended into the middle of things I didn’t choose, usually dragging me along, kicking and screaming because I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want to become more self-aware. I didn’t want to learn how selfish I had always been.

I began to notice something else as well: spirituality here is rarely spectacular. It’s not in ten-day vipassana retreats or sunrise yoga sessions on the Ganges. It’s in the way neighbors check on each other during hard times, in the ritual of quick poojas and prayers in the mornings and evenings, in hobbling together a community meal for a festival, in the patience demanded by long queues and traffic. It’s in the laughter of children playing outside, in the unspoken resilience of people tending to the small tasks of life, extraordinary for Westerners and the privileged, ordinary for many, many others. Living here, you begin to see that the sacred is woven into the everyday routines.

Connection Over Consumption

I’ve come to think the difference is this:

Consumption says, I’ll travel, I’ll pay, I’ll collect my transformation like a souvenir.

Connection says, I’ll keep showing up for people, traditions, and rituals, even when it’s ordinary, even when it’s inconvenient.

The first is exhilarating, but it rarely lasts. The second is much slower and harder to market, but it endures. It’s the work of presence, the steady accumulation of small acts and observations that shape who you become. Meaning is built, piece by piece, in showing up, paying attention, and participating in life as it unfolds.

What I’ve Come to See

So I don’t see myself in the seekers that arrive with plans to awaken some deep wisdom inside of themselves. I see them as people chasing a tale they were handed.

When I began writing about “India Syndrome,” I thought it was a story about travelers who lose themselves and the privilege of foreigners who come here seeking inner peace. But what I’ve come to see is that it isn’t really about India at all. It’s about the longings and aches we carry, the ones that tell us where to look for change. Transformation and finding meaning in life is not escaping into a myth, but staying long enough for your own story to deepen.

Closing Reflection

Edward Said warned in his 2003 preface to Orientalism that the world was hurtling toward a dangerous homogeneity, of differences being flattened by the media and the ways we represent each other. Two decades later, I see a different kind of flattening here, too, in the daily life shaped by global markets and lifestyles. The India that once seemed like a sanctuary for spirituality is not untouched by these. I walk into the mall where we do our shopping, and I am blasted with Starbucks, Burger King, KFC—the list goes on. The contrasts that once felt so stark, between “East” and “West,” between here and there, are becoming more and more blurred as the years go by.

Maybe that’s why I no longer notice as many differences between India and the U.S. Or maybe it’s because I’ve learned to adapt in both places. Either way, the search for “pure” spirituality was always chasing a mirage. The world is blending, converging. And it’s becoming harder to see where one culture ends and another begins.

So maybe what we’re losing isn’t India, or the West, or any particular culture at all. Maybe what’s slipping is our willingness to remain human together—to know our neighbors, to show patience in traffic, to practice rituals that take more than a swipe or a tap. The internet promises us infinite connection, but it mostly sells us distraction, performance, and more consumption. In that sense, India Syndrome isn’t about coming here at all; it’s about the ache we carry when we mistake capitalism for communion. And if there’s any cure, it won’t come from a plane ticket or a retreat. It will come from staying, from choosing presence, from resisting the long drift into sameness by living the small acts that make us human again.

If you do come to India, come to see it for what it is. You might take home some insights, but they most likely won’t last. For “finding yourself,” start at home with what’s in front of you and underneath your feet. Dig your soul deep into the soil. Water it. Tend to it. Let it grow into something truly meaningful. That’s where the real transformation lives.

This essay concludes a series on India Syndrome, Orientalism, and spirituality seeking in India. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Images from Pexels and LinkedIn.

The Surprising Origin of Shampoo: From Massage to Hair Wash

We think of “shampoo” today as the stuff you squirt onto your head when you want your hair to smell fresh again. But the word itself has a backstory that’s richer than an argan-oil conditioner and more surprising than finding out your “herbal blend” shampoo is mostly water.

Left: Sake Dean Mahomed, Indian entrepreneur who opened the famous Brighton “Mahomed’s Baths” in 1814; Right: A colonial “champoo,” no soap involved.

The British Raj and a Massage, Not a Rinse

The story begins in the 18th century, when Britain’s colonial presence in India was at full steam. British traders, soldiers, and administrators encountered not only a dizzying array of spices and fabrics, but also new wellness traditions, including the practice of head and body massages.

In Hindi, the verb chāmpo (चाँपो) means “press” or “knead.” It comes from the Sanskrit root capayati (“to press” or “to soothe”). When British ears caught it, they rendered it as “champoo” or “shampoo,” which referred specifically to massaging the head or body with oils.

Back then, if someone in 18th-century London offered you a shampoo, you’d be melting into a relaxing massage, not a deep scalp wash.

From Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases
From Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases

The First “Shampooing” in Britain

One of the earliest champions of shampooing (in the massage sense) in Britain was Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian entrepreneur. After an earlier venture, a restaurant called the “Hindostanee Coffee House” didn’t take off, he found fame by establishing “Mahomed’s Baths” in Brighton around 1814.

There, he offered “Indian Medicated Vapour Baths” and “shampooing” services to the fashionable and health-conscious elite. These were elaborate, spa-like treatments involving steam, oils, and massage.

In his advertisements, Mahomed presented shampooing as both exotic and therapeutic, a kind of health cure as much as a luxury. In a way, he planted the seed that would later bloom into the shampoo we know, though it would take another century and a half for soap to join the party.

From Massage to Suds

So, how did a word about pressing muscles turn into one about scrubbing scalps? Over time, “shampoo” in English expanded to mean not just the act of massaging, but also the washing of hair, especially when that washing involved a vigorous rub. The massage aspect faded into the background, and by the mid-19th century, “to shampoo” was being used for cleaning hair in the literal, soapy sense.

Commercial shampoo as a product didn’t appear until the early 20th century, when chemists developed liquid formulas specifically for hair. Before that, people in the West often used ordinary soap or flakes, which were harsh and left hair dull, while Indians had been using herbal pastes, oils, and powders for centuries. Nevertheless, the new “shampoos” were gentler and left hair more manageable. By then, the original Indian massage meaning was almost entirely forgotten.

A Global Shampoo Family Tree

Interestingly, the word “shampoo” kept its connection to massage longer in other parts of the world. In modern Hindi, “चाँपो” (chāmpo) still means “press” or “massage,” and “चंपी” (champī) is a head massage. In some Southeast Asian countries, “shampoo” or a similar-sounding word can still mean a massage treatment.

“Discriminating” women use Watkins in this 1920s shampoo ad.

What’s in a Name? Apparently, a Whole Spa

Today, “shampoo” is almost universally associated with hair washing, complete with a variety of scents, promises, and prices. The original link to Indian wellness culture is mostly invisible to modern consumers. But the next time you lather up, you’re unwittingly borrowing from a centuries-old tradition of massage, colonial encounters, and cross-cultural word travel.

And if you’ve ever enjoyed a scalp massage at a salon before the rinse…well, that’s a tiny echo of shampoo’s origin.

Word Origin Corner

Shampoo’s journey is a neat example of semantic shift, where a word changes meaning over time. Here, it went from “massage” (no soap) → “hair massage” (maybe soap) → “hair washing” (definitely soap). A similar thing happened to “broadcast,” which once meant scattering seeds in a field and now mostly means transmitting TV or radio signals. Or my favorite: the shift of “nice” from meaning ignorant and foolish to pleasant.

Language changes not just because of cultural trends, but because people borrow words, stretch their meanings, and sometimes rinse them under warm water until they become something new entirely.

The Takeaway

Next time you shampoo your hair, you can smugly inform anyone within earshot (and I certainly don’t do this): “You know, this used to mean a massage in colonial India.” Whether or not they thank you is another matter, but at least your hair will be clean, your scalp will be happy, and your vocabulary will be a little richer.

Modern ads still promising the world to your hair.

Further Reading / Sources

Inherited Scripts: Orientalism and Mystical India, Part 2 of 3

Always Searching

When Justin Shetler disappeared into the Parvati Valley with a sadhu, he was stepping into a story that had been written long before he was born.

The mythical “India” many Western seekers carry in their heads didn’t just appear out of thin air. It’s the result of centuries of writing, painting, sermonizing, and photographing by colonizers, missionaries, and scholars. People who arrived with their own agendas and left with narratives that served them more than the people they described.

From the late 18th century onward, British Orientalists studied Sanskrit texts, Hindu philosophy, and Indian epics, not only to understand them but also to frame them for Western consumption.

When Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, he fell in love with Sanskrit texts like Shakuntala. But he translated them the only way he knew how—through the lens of Greek classics and the Bible. A few decades later, James Mill wrote his History of British India without ever setting foot there, describing Indian culture as backward and despotic.

Colonial ethnographers romanticized some aspects of Indian spirituality while dismissing others as superstition. William Carey, arriving in Bengal in 1793, translated the Bible even as he condemned Hindu practices, overlooking that Christianity had already existed in India for centuries.

In the mid-19th century, British photographer Samuel Bourne lugged his huge camera into the Himalayas and produced dreamy pictures of temples, sadhus, and misty peaks. Back in London, these images confirmed for readers that India was timeless and mystical, while the realities of famine and politics were conveniently cropped out.

Two stereotypes emerged from all this: India as timeless wisdom, and India as backward chaos. Both were useful to the British Empire and beyond: one justified the “civilizing missions,” the other sold India as a curiosity cabinet.

Spirituality as a Colonial Export

Ironically, many Indian spiritual traditions gained fame in the West through the very structures of colonialism. Texts were translated, performances staged, and lectures given in London or Paris. The most marketable elements—yoga, Vedanta, certain forms of meditation—were cut from their original contexts and pasted as universal philosophies.

By 1893, Swami Vivekananda was in Chicago, dazzling audiences at the Parliament of Religions with his vision of Vedanta as a universal philosophy. A generation later, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi became a counterculture bible in California. Both men stressed the universality of their philosophies, but their Western audiences consumed them as spiritual “others.”

Meanwhile, at home, the British Raj often undermined or repressed living religious practices, such as closing temples, regulating pilgrimages, and policing gatherings, while happily exporting a purified, aestheticized version of Indian spirituality to the West.

Postcolonial but Not Post-Orientalist

Even after independence in 1947, the West’s appetite for the “mystical East” didn’t fade. It changed branding. The 1960s and 70s brought the Beatles to Rishikesh, hippies to Goa, and the counterculture’s embrace of gurus, ashrams, and psychedelic enlightenment.

The Beatles’ 1968 stay at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh turned meditation into a global craze, while hippies built whole enclaves in Goa. The empire was gone, but the Orientalist script survived, dressed in tie-dye instead of khaki.

Modern yoga studios, mindfulness apps, and wellness retreats are part of the same lineage. In 2014, the UN declared International Yoga Day, celebrating yoga as a gift from India to the world. But by then, yoga studios from Los Angeles to Berlin had already stripped away much of its religious and philosophical roots, selling it as a universal wellness fix. Another neat package, easy to consume.

The industry thrives on a spiritual shorthand: chakras, incense, sunrise chants. These aren’t inventions, but they’re often curated fragments of India, detached from the culture and society that gave them meaning.

It’s not that Western seekers shouldn’t learn from Indian traditions, but the relationship is rarely equal. When spiritual India is treated as a service economy, something to be visited, consumed, and left behind, it becomes harder to see its people as more than extras in someone else’s awakening story.

Why the Script Still Works

The old Orientalist fantasy persists because it answers a Western longing. For centuries, “the East” has been imagined as a place where modern life’s alienation can be cured, where there’s still authentic meaning to be found. India, with its visible spirituality and religions, complicated history, and contrast to Western cultures, fits the role perfectly.

That fantasy colors travel writing and Instagram posts, and it shapes the paths people take. It tells them what to look for, how to frame their experiences, and sometimes, tragically, how far they’re willing to go to live out the script.

On social media, this fantasy can swing both ways. Just as some travelers come chasing enlightenment, others build whole reels around India’s poverty, traffic, or chaos. The effect is the same: India is flattened into a caricature.

Imagine if someone filmed only Skid Row in Los Angeles and claimed it represented all of America. Every country has its shadows, yet India often gets held up as if those shadows are the whole picture. That, too, is a modern form of Orientalism: selecting what confirms a stereotype and ignoring the rest.

And that’s what makes “India Syndrome” such a slippery term. It goes beyond breakdowns in the Himalayas; it’s how the story of India, as inherited from colonialism, can seduce someone into abandoning their own reality.

Some, like Justin Shetler, vanish into that story entirely. Others return home with a few thousand photos and some harrowing stories to tell. Others collect what they believe are epiphanies, which slip into the ether after they slide back into their home’s routine. But even more don’t come at all, choosing instead to nibble on pieces of a 5,000-year-old culture that they feel will patch the void inside them. No matter how it’s done, the same script is still being performed.

The India so many Western travelers arrive seeking is rarely the India they actually encounter. Guidebooks, films, and memoirs have long trafficked in images of a timeless, mystical land—a place to be “discovered” rather than lived in. This is the shadow of Orientalism, the old habit of painting India as exotic, irrational, or spiritual in contrast to a supposedly practical, rational West.

And yet, the story isn’t that simple. Over time, many Indians themselves have adopted, adapted, and even marketed these same images. Yoga teacher training centers, curated “heritage villages,” or pricey retreats by the Ganges all cater to the longing of visitors who want to taste a certain kind of India. For some, these motifs have become a source of pride or income, often pragmatically so. For others, they remain frustrating distortions that compress the diversity and contradictions of the country.

The problem isn’t that seekers come; people have always traveled to India for learning, trade, or inspiration. The problem lies in the hunger for a single story: that India is here to provide spiritual rescue, that transformation is something to be consumed. That desire often blinds travelers to the ordinary ways people here live, worship, and endure.

Even my own experience here has been a constant negotiation with this script—resisting and repeating it, always aware it is much older than me.

Up Next: Part 3 – My time in India, and why so many white travelers chase meaning far away from home.

And if you haven’t read part 1, you can check it out here.

Note: All images from Pexels.

Inherited Scripts: the Search for “India Syndrome,” Part 1 of 3

What Is India Syndrome?

Why do some Western travelers come to India seeking spiritual transformation, only to vanish, sometimes without a trace?

Some say these disappearances are the result of “India Syndrome.”

Don’t be mistaken. “India Syndrome” isn’t a medical diagnosis. The phrase was coined by French psychiatrist Régis Airault, who worked with embassy staff treating foreigners in India suffering sudden psychological breakdowns. Symptoms are said to include disorientation, delusion, spiritual obsession, and the urge to detach from society, often triggered, Airault suggested, by travel in the subcontinent.

The phrase raises all kinds of red flags for me. It feels too vague, even too condescending. Is it a genuine phenomenon, or just an Orientalist label slapped onto culture shock and untreated mental illness in an unfamiliar culture?

The Disappearance of Justin Shetler

I had read about India Syndrome in a Guardian article titled ‘Travelers who were lost forever’: why tourists experience ‘India syndrome,’ but most of those written about made it out of their psychological breaks just fine. I didn’t realize how serious these experiences could be until I read about Justin Alexander Shetler.

He was an American adventurer, young and smart, who had traveled widely and documented his spiritual journey with real thoughtfulness. In 2016, he vanished in the Parvati Valley after setting off on a pilgrimage with a sadhu. His final Instagram post read:

If I don’t come back, don’t look for me.

He had come to India seeking something: transcendence, transformation, detachment from the self. And then he disappeared, leaving behind a swirl of grief and speculation. Was it a tragic accident? A spiritual quest gone too far? Or was he consumed by the story of India he was already writing?

Stories like his collide with a country already carrying centuries of other people’s projections. To talk about India Syndrome without talking about that projection, about Orientalism, is to miss the bigger picture.

The Shadow Of Orientalism

India Syndrome isn’t new. It’s the latest chapter in a story Edward Said called Orientalism: the West’s longstanding habit of casting “the East” as its mystical opposite. India, in this fantasy, is no longer a country; it’s a metaphor. A place to lose yourself, find yourself, or (in Shetler’s case) vanish trying.

And so the idea of India that travelers bring is often already mythic. It’s been passed down through yoga studios, self‑help books, and colonial literature: India as a spiritual testing ground, a mirror, a maze. But when reality refuses to match the fantasy, the fallout can be intense.

Book Cover of the First Edition of Orientalism by Edward Said. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49638266

A Certain Privilege

Who, exactly, gets to “lose themselves” in India?

More often than not, it’s white, educated Westerners with the freedom and the resources to wander. The ones who can afford to drop out for a few months, go on retreat, or disappear into the mountains. Choosing India as the backdrop for personal transformation is, in many ways, a consumer decision.

Of course, not every traveler arrives clutching a copy of Eat, Pray, Love, but it’s rare to meet a foreigner completely free of those expectations. The “spiritual East” is so deeply embedded in Western imagination that even those who reject the clichés still bring crumbs of it with them.

There’s a certain privilege in being able to fall apart and then be found. When travelers go missing, embassies get involved. Families launch global searches. Articles are written.

It’s clear to see: When a Western traveler vanishes, it’s a mystery. When an Indian pilgrim goes missing, it’s a statistic. The heartbreak is equal, but the news coverage is not.

Meanwhile, most local voices, such as guides, sadhus, neighbors, police, and even Indian spiritual seekers, rarely appear in the narrative except as background figures. India becomes a stage, not a speaking role.

That raises uncomfortable questions: Where’s the line between spiritual curiosity and exoticism? Between seeking meaning and expecting a place to hand it to you? And what does it mean that so many of these stories treat Indian traditions as if they exist solely for foreigners?

I don’t have neat answers. But I have crossed paths with travelers who seemed to be drifting far from reality.

Not a Mirror, Not a Maze, Just a Country

One early morning, at the front gate of the Dhikala zone in Jim Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand, I noticed a white man leaning against a tree.

At first, I thought he might be a tourist from a nearby resort. But the closer I looked, the less sense that made. His cycle was old and battered. A plastic jug of murky liquid hung from one handlebar. A grimy plastic bag swung from the other. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes.

He spoke to the guards for several minutes, then got his cycle and rode off toward town.
“What’s that about?” I asked my husband.
“That guy wants to ride his cycle through the park,” he said. “He’s riding it all the way to Rishikesh.”

The guards laughed. Not cruelly, but with the familiarity of people who had seen something like this before. I don’t know if he was a regular, a wanderer, or simply someone too deep in his own creation of India. The kind of figure whose story would be recounted as a quest, while a local doing the same might be dismissed as desperate or unwell.

But that’s the thing about India Syndrome: it’s never about the person who’s actually unwell. It’s about the stories we tell to explain them. A local man cycling barefoot through tiger territory would be called mad or poor. A white man doing the same becomes a seeker, a mystic, or a cautionary tale.

India itself doesn’t cause these breakdowns. But something else does: ages of Western fantasies that have whispered to generations of seekers:

Welcome to India: the cure for whatever you think is missing in your soul.

Up Next: Part 2 – Who wrote that mythical script, and why do we keep performing it?

Come to Earth as a Woman: Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp

Quick take:

Heart Lamp is a tender, unflinching collection of stories about Muslim women in Karnataka, mothers, brides, housekeepers, whose quiet lives burn with the fire of the sun.
The translation avoids italics and footnotes, letting readers step fully into these worlds without exoticizing them.
Read if you’re drawn to fiction that sits in your heart long after the final page.

Meet Banu Mushtaq

I ordered Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp before I even knew what it was about. On my Facebook feed, I’d come across a post celebrating her Booker Prize win for this collection of short stories. What drew me in was that her stories had been translated from Kannada, a South Indian language rarely seen on global literary stages. And when I read her acceptance speech quote, “No story is ever small,” I was hooked, long before I cracked the spine of the paperback

But I soon learned that before turning to fiction, Mushtaq had worked as an activist and journalist, advocating for the rights of Muslim women in Karnataka and beyond. The stories in Heart Lamp reflect what she witnessed and heard during that time in her career.

Universal Threads

Stitching together the everyday lives of Muslim women, Mushtaq accomplishes her mission: she takes the personal and makes it political. Each selected tale reveals what it means to be a woman, not only within the homes and streets of her stories, but also within the larger currents of a global reality. Though several terms (“jama’at,” “kafan,” “seragu,” “mutawalli,” among others) were unfamiliar to me, Mushtaq writes with such intimacy that definitions feel unnecessary; the emotions of her characters go beyond language.

For example, in “Black Cobras,” much of the action unfolds within the walls of a mosque, with references to Quranic rules I know little about. Yet the desperation of Aashraf, a mother staging a sit-in protest, is visceral:

“The powdery rain falling relentlessly…had not cooled the fire in her gut… The hunger that was gnawing at her stomach with sharp nails had not weakened her…. hers was a dog’s belly that could be filled somehow or the other…. She was ready to fight for [her children’s] right to live their lives.”

This primal urge to protect her children is recognizable to so many mothers.

And in another story, “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!,” Mushtaq tackles arranged marriage and dowry harassment with equal force. Yet even for those of us untouched by these realities, she writes lines that pierce with familiarity:

“I was on the road to becoming a mother myself but I stood in a corner constantly looking back down the road to my maternal home.”

Who hasn’t, at some point, longed for the comfort of their mother?

A Big “No” to Italics

Beyond the book’s themes questioning patriarchy and traditions (cultural and religious), something I appreciate about it is translator Deepa Bhasthi’s decision not to italicize non-English words or use footnotes to define transliterated terms. After living in a South Indian state for nearly 13 years, I’m acutely aware of English’s chokehold on the world. A book like this, telling stories and struggles of women that feel universal, would have lost some of its immediacy if italics had pulled my mind out of the narrative. While reading, it didn’t matter whether I knew every Kannada or Islamic term; what I felt was the anguish, the numbness, the power in these tales.

I also agree completely with Bhasthi’s statement: “Italics… announce words as imported from another language, exoticising them and keeping them alien to English.” Now, as I reflect on the book, I can look up the words I didn’t know, gaining something new because of her choice.

Even without definitions and italics, Mushtaq’s prose flows with an intimacy that draws the reader inside the minds of these women, or into the homes of their families. Certain images recur across the collection—the heart as a lamp or a toy, hands pressed to walls, the relentless rain and heat—forming threads that stitch these tales into a mourning shroud.

Though her narratives are rooted in Kannada culture and the lives of Muslim women, they never exclude; instead, they open doors for readers to step into unfamiliar worlds. Much of this accessibility is thanks to Bhasthi’s translation, which preserves the original’s cadence and quirks while letting Mushtaq’s political and social undertones ripple outwards.

There’s a restraint to the storytelling, even in moments of despair or rage, that makes the emotional weight hit harder. Mushtaq never shies from truth or harsh reality either: the women who act on their “big-big” feelings in these stories often come from more privileged social and financial backgrounds. Those without such privilege are often forced to stay mute, for whatever repressive reason, but their silence feels no less powerful.

Kinship and Solidarity

Along with this silence, what lingers most after finishing Heart Lamp is not just the stories themselves but the sense of solidarity that flows from the narratives to the reader. Mushtaq gives voice to women who might never otherwise be heard.

Yaseen Bua, the long-suffering housekeeper in “The Shroud,” is a perfect example. Abandoned by her husband, she cleans and cooks for several families, quietly saving for her one dream: her son’s wedding. But as her body begins to fail, she is struck by the inevitability of her own death. With her meager savings, she makes a single request of her employer: to bring back a burial shroud soaked in ZamZam water from Hajj. By the end of this story, we should be pressing palms to our eyes in shame over the selfishness of the privileged and the self-erasure of the marginalized.

Reading these stories felt like both a revelation and a bridge. As someone far removed from these cultural specifics, I kept returning to the universality of Mushtaq’s characters: their pain, their perseverance, their subdued resistance. I was especially moved by a moment when a bride, after pressing her hennaed hands to the western wall of her new home, is suddenly assaulted by the weight of her new life:

“…her sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, their expenses, food, clothing, a mother-in-law who was always sick… Her own dreams withered away.”

In these brief moments, Mushtaq delivers on her claim that “No story is ever small,” reminding us how even the quietest lives can burn with the fire of the sun.

The Weight of Womanhood

Mushtaq’s stories resist simplification. For as many unlikable men that are in this book, there are unlikable wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. The stories are layered with the injustices, compromises, and overall oppression that women endure daily.

Even though many of these stories were written in the early 1990s, they remain painfully relevant today, as seen by the endless stream of tragic headlines. As the final story reminds us, the experience of womanhood cannot be understood from a distance. “Come to earth as a woman… Be a woman once, Oh Lord!”

Note: Images sourced from Pexels.

The Mango and the Map of Language

In Kerala, mango season begins quietly. A lone vendor sets out a crate of glowing yellows and blushing oranges, sometimes tinted with stripes of green, by the roadside. Then another vendor appears. And another.

By May, mangoes seem to be everywhere: stacked in pyramids on rickety tables, carted down alleyways in woven baskets, filling the dining room with a pungent sweetness as they ripen.

We wait to buy from a vendor near our home, who snags the best variety, the best quality. He and his wife also make a mean mutton soup.

A non-exhaustive list of all the mangoes in India.

The journey of the mango through centuries.

It’s easy to take this fruit for granted. There’s mango season, and there’s the waiting season, like the steady ticking of a clock.

But too often, we separate ourselves from the journey our foods make, from the backbreaking farm labor and the heartbreak of a lost mango crop in a too-rainy summer season, to the post-workout smoothies of the privileged.

And if the fruit itself has such a fraught journey, then what about the word mango? Where did it come from? Which cultures first used it? How did it weave its way into English?

From Malayalam to the World

The English “mango” traces its roots to māṅṅa (മാങ്ങ) in Malayalam, the language of Kerala. But the journey of a word is rarely straightforward. Some scholars suggest the Portuguese first heard it from Malayalam speakers, while others argue it came from Tamil neighbors, who called the raw fruit māṅkāy (மாங்காய்) and the ripe fruit māmpaḻam (மாம்பழம்). Since Malayalam and Tamil are both part of the Dravidian language family, it’s difficult to pinpoint which word sailed west first.

Portuguese traders adopted it as manga during their 15th-century spice voyages. By the time they established a sea route to Europe, Arab traders had already been exporting Kerala’s spices, and words like naranga (orange), for centuries.

From Ostler’s book mentioned below. The Portuguese trading empire.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama succeeded where Columbus had failed: charting a direct sea route to India and landing on the Malabar Coast. This was likely when māṅṅa first touched a Western tongue.

Found on Reddit. Maps the rough journey of the word “mango” from both Proto-Southern-Dravidian and Sanskrit.
Found in the same thread on Reddit as the previous map. I just thought it was interesting!

As with most colonial encounters, da Gama’s arrival brought more than trade. It brought upheaval; an attempt to claim, exploit, and remake a culture the Portuguese barely understood. Like every empire, they left behind a tangled legacy: trade routes that changed more than cuisines, and violence that uprooted lives.

From 1498 onwards, manga traveled into French and Italian, then into English, with the first recorded use of “mango” appearing in 1582.

For a time, “to mango” was even a verb in colonial America, meaning “to pickle” (which is why some places still call green bell peppers “mango peppers”).

Today, we’ve untangled mangoes from pickles and peppers. But the legacy of colonialism is not so easily resolved.

But there’s a truth here worth admiring: a tiny word like māṅṅa can travel across oceans and centuries, weaving itself into English. Every time someone says “mango” in London or Philadelphia, they’re unknowingly speaking a fragment of Kerala’s language.

Language as a Recipe Book

But it isn’t just mango. Our English-speaking homes and kitchens are stocked with Indian words carried along trade routes and colonial corridors:

Chutney (from Hindi chaṭnī)
Curry (from Tamil kari)
Bungalow (from Hindi banglā, meaning “Bengal-style house”)
Shampoo (from Hindi chāmpo, “to knead”)

Each word is an artifact, if only we take a moment to wonder. They are small testaments to hands that stirred, chopped, hammered, and kneaded across centuries, reminders of the histories and people behind them.

The Journey Hidden in a Word

Now, when I bite into a mango here, I taste more than its layered sweetness. I hear the word’s journey too, spoken first by a Malayali vendor in Trivandrum, sailing across seas and empires, and scrawled on a supermarket sign in Pennsylvania.

Language carries more than meanings. It carries fragments of history and home, especially for those caught between roots.

For Further Reading (if you crave more about erstwhile empires and their legacies):

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World – Nicholas Ostler.
Inglorious Empire – Shashi Tharoor
The international swap trade in useful words, BBC Magazine (2014)
Arrival of Portuguese in India and its Role in Shaping India – Col. (Dr.) D. P. K. Pillay (2021)