At the end of Barbara Clooney’s classic picture book “Miss Rumphius,” a tall woman with long gray hair has accomplished the three goals she set for herself in life: to go to faraway places, live in a house by the sea and make the world more beautiful.
If “Miss Rumphius” hadn’t been inspired by the real-life Hilda Edwards, it could have been about Falmouth’s Jane Parhiala. Ms. Parhiala lives on Cape Cod, which is by the sea; she has traveled to faraway places all her life and made the world more beautiful through her practice of weaving. But Ms. Parhiala had one other “bucket list” item—to write a book.
Now she has accomplished that, as well.
Released this year through EBook Bakery Books, “Reckless at the Border” tells the story of Ms. Parhiala’s first marriage, to Pradeep Parashar, an Indian travel agent living in the United States who Ms. Parhiala met and married within three months back in 1979.
The book was a joint effort between Ms. Parhiala and Mr. Parashar, which came about when Mr. Parashar reached out to Ms. Parhiala over the internet after having had no contact for more than 30 years.
The book reads as part memoir, part action-adventure and part romantic comedy. The chapters in the beginning of the book that tell of Mr. Parashar’s misadventures in getting to the United States are full of meetups gone awry, swindles, bungled drug smuggling and Mr. Parashar’s having to rely on little more than luck and wit to reach his goals.
Ms. Parhiala’s story of her own travels, first in Sweden and then from California to Central America, are equally compelling.
The marriage is full of travel and adventure, but also of misunderstandings across a cultural divide.
After reconnecting and deciding to collaborate on the book, Ms. Parhiala traveled to India to meet with Mr. Parashar and work on the book together.
“Reckless at the Border” was five years in the making, with Ms. Parhiala traveling to and from India on several occasions to meet in person with Mr. Parashar in addition to much back-and-forth using email.
While the book is written in two distinct voices, it fell on Ms. Parhiala to do the majority of the writing. Ms. Parhiala said she would meet with Mr. Parashar, taking notes as he talked and then typing them out on her computer back at her hotel. She would go over what she had written with Mr. Parashar the next day.
“Basically I did the writing and, when it was his story, and I tried to use his voice,” said Ms. Parhiala, adding that it also fell to her to “orchestra how the book was going to go.”
The book was written both to tell a story to others and to finish a story that both Ms. Parhiala and Mr. Parashar have been telling for years. “This part of my life was extraordinary to me,” Ms. Parhiala said. “I thought it was so unusual. I had great expectations of this marriage. I had no idea it would turn around into this adventure.”
The story of her first marriage is a story Ms. Parhiala has been telling, in some form, for 34 years. “Someone might ask if I’d been married before, and I would say that I married a man from India, and they would want to know the story, and I would get going on it and they would say, ‘No, I can’t believe that,’ and then they would say, ‘And then what happened,’ and so I had to keep going, and Pradeep was doing the same thing.”
Finding out what had happened to Mr. Parashar in the ensuing years after they parted was another motivation for writing the book. “I had to find out if he was okay,” Ms. Parhiala said. “We didn’t leave as enemies; we just knew that this was not going to work.”
Ms. Parhiala said she has received positive feedback from readers who have found the book interesting and enjoyed the travel aspects. “A lot of people have told me the book made them enthusiastic about maybe traveling themselves,” said Ms. Parhiala, adding she fell in love with India when she went there. “The textiles, the food, the people, the smells. I loved it all.”
Beyond being a tale of two different people and two different cultures, Ms. Parhiala said it is also a story about relationships and the choices we make in our lives. “If I hadn’t said yes to this exotic man from India, where would my life have gone? I certainly opened a Pandora’s box when I said yes, which is something that I wanted, I guess. I was searching for something new in my life, something different.”
Another underlying message in the book is that it’s okay if something doesn’t work out, “you can pick yourself up and keep going.” Both Mr. Parashar and Ms. Parhiala went on to marry other people, have successful careers and raise families.
Readers might also feel nostalgia for a place and a time that likely doesn’t exist anymore: taking rides from strangers, traveling on a whim to foreign countries, hitchhiking from place to place. The 1970s seemed to be a time of exploration. “A lot of people I’ve talked to, especially women, talk about their travels in the 70s,” Ms. Parhiala said. “We all traveled through Europe in Volkswagen busses. My trip to El Salvador was completely reckless. I wouldn’t recommend a single woman doing that alone.”
After meeting in person and sharing stories back and forth on email, Ms. Parhiala said, she wound up with pages and pages of writing. “I had the chapters and parts of the book in my mind, so I got the index cards out and starting doing an outline with the cards on a bulletin board. There was paper everywhere,” she said.
At this point Ms. Parhiala decided to learn about how a book gets written, signing up for workshops and conferences with the Cape Cod Writers Center. “That’s how the writing started. I just immersed myself and started writing,” she said.
Among the local writers who helped Ms. Parhiala move the book along were local author Dan Robb, Jenna Bernstein of Martha’s Vineyard and author Kathryn Perrone of Mashpee, who writes paranormal romance novels under the pen name of Kathryn Knight. Ms. Parhiala said Ms. Perrone was instrumental in helping her arrange the story and come up with an enticing opening. Ms. Parhiala’s daughter Kira designed the book’s cover.
A lifelong reader, Ms. Parhiala listed classic expatriate authors including Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein as some of her influences. Recalling a trip to Paris with her daughter, she said they were in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the heart of the city. “We went in and bought books by Hemingway and Stein, and we read and fell in love with the way they were writing,” she said.
Ms. Parhiala said she is also part of a Nordic noir book group that reads Scandinavian authors such as Jussi Adler-Olsen of Denmark and Jo Nesbo of Norway. Other favorite reads include “Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey” by Anastasia M. Ashman and “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery.
“I’ve become so appreciative of words,” Ms. Parhiala said. “We are what we speak. We are all artists in our own ways.”
In addition to being a reader, Ms. Parhiala has also kept journals for most of her life. “It’s mostly travel writing,” she said. “When I travel, I always take a special journal with me. Every day I write in the journal and take photos.”
For her next writing project, Ms. Parhiala plans to turn some of those travel adventures into short stories saying she has a few incidents that were especially bizarre: a time she went rock climbing, travels with her children in the Bahamas and a women’s sailing school that she describes as “hilarious.”
In summing up “Reckless at the Border,” Ms. Parhiala called it a book about two people trying to find out who they are and where they fit in. “I think that’s what Pradeep and I were trying to do, and finding each other was going to be putting the puzzle together that maybe would make us whole. Expectations and relationships are both universal themes. Differences in culture and misunderstandings, all this is part of relationships, and I think we hit it all in ours. It’s like Rick Steves says, ‘Just keep traveling, and you never know what stories might transpire,’” she said.
“Reckless at the Border” was published in March. It is available for purchase locally.
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