A Kaleidoscope
of Memories

A girl grows up in a bungalow in Bangalore with no father, five aunts and a grandmother who teaches her to knit with broom stalks. She finishes school at thirteen. She is one of fifty admitted to the best medical school in India, and the youngest of them. At twenty-four she lands in New York with fifteen dollars and a Bible too big for her suitcase.

And then she is told to stop. What that cost her, and how she got back, past a doctrine, a marriage and seven silent years, is the heart of this book.

The rest is a life spent arriving somewhere new and starting again: a consultant post in Surrey, a ruined farmhouse in Gascony, a laboratory in Boston, a chair at Harvard, and finally a paintbrush.