I first arrived in Hawaii in 1979. I was not a tourist on vacation. In fact, I had a job. Not just any job but a dream job. I worked for the East West Center as a research fellow. The East West Center was a phenomenal place at that time. Its motto was to promote understanding between the East and the West. It was funded by the United States Agency for International Development. Until recently not many people were aware of this agency, but since Trump completely gutted the agency, people have heard of it. The early 1980s was a prime era for the USAID. It was before globalization, before the high-tech boom. The EWC was one place where scholars and academics across Asia and the Pacific could get together to grapple with issues such as climate change and discuss ideas about how to improve the lives of people in places like India and the Philippines.
In Hawaii I discovered a new language, Hawaiian. I learned words like hale, which meant a house. For my first month I lived in Hale Manoa, a student dormitory on the campus of the University of Hawaii, which was also where the Center was located. I had arrived here from Berkeley after finishing my graduate degree in energy and resources. Later I moved into my own apartment on campus, 200 yards from the Center. I’d roll out of bed in the morning and head for the cafeteria whose French toast was legendary.
In Hawaii I discovered a food called sushi. In fact, I didn’t know the word sushi. We saw a Japanese restaurant in a mall in Honolulu. I was there with my new boyfriend who was a cute Indian guy named Atul. We asked the restaurant what they served and they said raw fish. We thought to ourselves yuck. I would eventually discover sushi with my boss in San Francisco, a few years later when I worked for the Pacific Gas & Electric company, but at that point in Hawaii, in Honolulu, sushi was as strange to me as was Thai food. I’d never heard of Thai food either, but I tasted it and loved it. I also discovered all these Asians there which I had not seen in the Bay Area, which by that point was not as diverse I suppose as it is today. I loved Hawaii where I learned to snorkel and dance the hula. We invented casual Fridays in Hawaii, long before the Bay Area discovered them. Women would walk around in muumuus and men in Hawaiian shirts. On Sunday nights the Center would show free movies at the auditorium where I would watch Psycho and Dr Strangelove for the first time.
After I left Hawaii because Ronald Reagan cut our funding for a project on energy and rural development in Asia I didn’t return for decades. But I cherished my memories of the East-West Center which funded my travels to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where we facilitated a conference attended by bigwig policymakers from across Asia. The big joke at the conference was that I sat behind a placard stating my country as the United States, alongside representatives from Indonesia, Malaysia, and my own native country, India.
During a weekend, two high level officials from India who were participating in the conference set off to traverse the nearby river and invited me to join them. As I floated down the tributary of the Mekong river with these two Indian gentlemen, felt stunned by how beautifully clean Thai villages were. I recalled that the Indian delegation at the meeting had warned me that I would find Thailand to be drastically poorer than the United States and India even much poorer than Thailand, but I hadn’t believed them. Now, remembering the squalor of India, I knew that Thailand was not like India.
We stopped at little villages along the way to buy fruit, encountering fellow Asians with big, wide smiles. They reminded me of a travelogue by a popular humorist named P.L Deshpande from my State of Maharashtra, who had made a similar observation about the wide smiles of Indonesians he had encountered in his travels.
Our boat made it to the Golden triangle, where the borders of Laos, Thailand and Burma – Myanmar – meet. Dusk fell as we wandered the streets, searching for accommodations. As we searched, we ran into a Burmese man who was a refugee. He had been in some kind of political trouble and had to escape Berma. He took us to somebody’s house where we were entertained to a simple but delicious meal. We were then taken to a little hotel. It was a very basic accommodation, with separate rooms for women and men. I slept in that hotel overnight. Once again, I was surprised as to how clean the bathrooms were, nothing like what you would expect in an Indian village. My Indian travel companions wanted to continue on their adventure, but as a facilitator of the meeting, I couldn’t possibly take the risk of going AWOL. I got up at the crack of dawn, walked the streets, and found a place for tea, which I was absolutely addicted to all my life. They gave me a plastic bag with some yellow liquid in it. I couldn’t believe that was Thai tea. It was not even in a cup. I don’t remember how I drank it. I asked around for a bus stop and somebody led me to it. I took a bus all the way from the Golden triangle back to the conference in Chiang Mai and when I arrived it was late morning and everyone was joking about how they were thinking of sending search parties after me and informing my parents of my disappearance.
From Thailand, the EWC sent me to India where I was to travel across villages to research solar, wind, and biomass projects aimed at improving the lives of villagers. Everywhere I went, officials invited me to stay in their homes. It was when I went to work for the EWC that I discovered South India. I’d never been to South India before, and I instantly warmed to the gentle and kind manners of the people there. I also discovered delicious Indian food with yogurt rice and other delicacies. I’ll never forget my stay in a dormitory in Madurai where I would sit in a line on the floor with all the people who lived in that dormitory – people who were working there – and eat a delicious feast served on banana leaves. I can’t ever forget those moments. I went to see the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai during that trip. Every now and then during my travels I’d go home to Nagpur to visit my parents for a few days. When I was invited to Delhi for a conference at the Delhi IIT, the Indian Institute of technology, I took my parents to Delhi, and it was the first time my parents traveled by plane anywhere. The first and the last time. I feel so nostalgic for those days.
For many decades I didn’t return to Hawaii because I was living in New Zealand and moving here and there, but eventually when I went back to Hawaii around 2010 or thereabouts, I felt a kind of nostalgia as well as excitement. It felt like coming home.
November 2025