COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

A Journey with Elsa Cloud Shows Up In Paperback

R S Shankar

"I wanted to be a stranger in a world where everything I saw, heard, touched, and tasted would be fresh and new...."

So begins Leila Hadley, twentyfive years old, divorced, itching for an adventure and bored with her successful New York career, as she sets off for the Far East with her six-year-old son, Kippy, for an adventure that would last more than five decades. To Manila and Hong Kong, Siam and Singapore, India and Syria, and on around the world on a sailboat named California.

Considered a classic among travel memoirs, Give Me the World is part commentary on the enigmatic beauty and culture of the Far East, and part exploration of the human spirit.

Leila Hadley, considered by the likes of writer Norman Mailer as one of America's great women and true originals, has two books in the market in North America now. Give Me the World has been reissued by St Martin's Press. And Penguin has issued a paperback edition of her last book, A Journey with Elsa Cloud.

"In Hindi, as Leila Hadley reminds us, her first name means 'cosmic play.' And what could be more appropriate for a woman whose openness and exuberance are a model for us all?" asks Pico Iyer, one of the most distinguished essayists and travel writers.

"In A Journey with Elsa Cloud, she charges towards India, her beloved daughter, and herself with a sense of wonder, a delight; and an aching honesty that cracks things open within and without. And all of it delivered with a sense of cosmic play," he says.

Leila Hadley was born in New York City, where she lives with her husband, Henry Luce III. The great-great-great-great-granddaughter of James Boswell, she is the author of many travel books.

"Whatever she is describing -- a storm at sea, a mutilation ritual, a gem dealer in Ceylon, or the marlin that got away -- Leila Hadley has an uncanny ability to make the reader see what she sees and feel what she feels," says Ted Morgan, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of Wilderness at Dawn.

"Written with great wit and passion, constructed as seductively as the spider's web, this is a romance about a young mother's liaison with the world, which taught her all the real and deep feelings of a life fully lived," Andrew Solomon, author of A Stone Boat, said of the book.

"It is the narrative of youth turning mature through magnificent experience, set in locations that would astonish even Sheherezade."

The hard cover edition of A Journey with Elsa Cloud was published about a year-and-a-half ago by a small New York press. But following critical acclaim, it was issued in paperback recently.

"The ebullient vocabulary of Leila Hadley's autobiography is a spree of images, emotions, places, in which she searches for some gift of self that will bring about reconciliation with an estranged daughter," wrote the Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer.

Norman Mailer called it "the best travel book I've ever read," adding, "It's more than that as well but let this suffice for the moment."

A Journey with Elsa Cloud begins when Hadley receives a call from her estranged daughter, who has become a Buddhist and Tibetan scholar living in India. With a little planning, Hadley travels to India and together they travel through the subcontinent on a journey during the 1970s culminating with a visit to the Dalai Lama.

Part travelogue, part commentary on India, and part exploration of the convoluted relationship between mothers and daughters, the book, says Hadley is the most challenging task she has ever undertaken.

"I did not want to rush through it," Hadley, who is in her 80s, says. She took over a decade to write and revise the book.

"I am still learning lessons from that journey, and of all the countries I have visited -- there are dozens -- I wonder if India could be replaced by another."

When she was young, Leila Hadley's grandmother told her that James Boswell, her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, "may have been naughty, indiscreet, and intemperate, but he was an excellent journalist."

Hadley is an excellent journalist and an extraordinary writer. She has recorded a journey to India inspired both by her lifelong love of travel and by a desire to reconcile with Veronica.

The book's title comes from Veronica's remark as a young girl that she wanted to be "the sea, the jungle, or else a cloud", thereby earning her homonymic endearment of Elsa Cloud.

A Journey with Elsa Cloud offers more than sensuous delights of India. It also is a story of friendships. Among the bonds she forged in India is the nurturing relationship Hadley cultivated with writer Mulk Raj Anand.

"He is one of the most gentle, lively and kind person I have ever known," Hadley has been telling visitors for many years. "You read his books and you get to know India better. He is the best travel guide I have had."

Previous story: Family, Friends Rally Around Basuta
Next story: Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam Smashes Records in US, England

Tell us what you think of this report