"Jenny was miserable, and it was all India's fault...until she realized that it wasn't."
In 2006, I was a newlywed living a charmed life as a fashion-obsessed, Starbucks-addicted yoga studio manager in New York City. I’d just finished graduate school and was excited to start the next phase of my life—ideally, writing my Great American Novel under a tree in Central Park. Then came news that would change everything. My husband, a computer forensics consultant for a global corporation, was asked to relocate to India to develop an emerging practice.
In other words? We were being outsourced.
Effective immediately.
So I packed up my little white dog, my yoga mat, and my New York attitude and headed to the third world. Before that plane ride, I’d never boiled an egg or made my own cup of coffee. Takeout wasn’t a luxury, it was a way of life. When I thought about our new life, I'd imagined glamorous expat parties and exotic adventures. Then I landed in India, and everything suddenly seemed upside down. There was no Starbucks, no sushi, no Bloomingdale’s. My favorite cocktail dress was stolen in customs. My stilettos were covered in mud. Not only did I have to learn how to operate a stove, but that stove was connected to a four-foot-tall gas tank in the middle of the kitchen and needed to be lit with a match. Infamous and invisible at the same time, I was stared at wherever I went--but in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, I was the loneliest I'd ever been.
Buffalo-related traffic jams, endless bouts of food poisoning, coal-pressed lingerie, goats floating in the road during the monsoon rains...those were just the beginning of my third world misadventures as I learned to navigate the unpaved roads of life as an expat housewife in Hyderabad, India. Ten thousand miles away from home, I struggled to fight off depression and anger as my marriage and my sense of self began to unravel. But after months of bitterness (and refusing to eat anything but takeout pizza,) I realized what the universe had been trying to tell me all along: India didn't need to change. I did. "Equal parts frustrations, absurdity and revelation, Karma Gone Bad is the true story of a Starbucks-loving city girl finding beauty in the chaos and making her way in the land of karma." coming from Sourcebooks in 2013
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