Nyt Author Santha Rama Rau dies at 86

I think what they say is true that when your obituaries appear in NYT you have made it.I had not read about or known Santha .And would have missed completely if not for the NYT obituaries by Bruce Webber.SHE WAS BORN in diplomats family of India and traveled and wrote about her travels.
From the obituaries her description of Hidukush is quite charming and i reproduce here.

“It is a short but extraordinarily dramatic flight,” she wrote in that book, of a trip from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan. “The Hindu Kush is the wildest and most forbidding part of the Himalayas, so high that the plane flies between, not over, the mountains, and from the cabin you look up to see the snow-capped, treacherous peaks. Below you is a harsh and bony map of precipitous valleys and rocky ravines — a landscape utterly without comfort, and on too immense a scale to be anything but daunting.”

Words of her grand mother on her visit to India after 10 years make a wonderful observation

“The first words my grandmother said to me when I returned to Bombay after 10 years’ absence were, ‘My dear child, where in India will we find a husband tall enough for you?’
“ ‘I don’t think I need to worry about that for some time,’ I suggested. ‘I’m only 16.’
“ ‘That’s nearly twice as old as I was on my wedding day.’ ”

This obituary celebrates end of life of a liberated woman author from a different era who tried to make a connection between India and the rest of world. I noticed with interest that she married second time after divorce from her first husband.This i am mentioning because it seems unusual for an Indian woman from her time.