{"id":39,"date":"2017-03-21T18:10:20","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T18:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/?p=39"},"modified":"2018-05-09T00:04:57","modified_gmt":"2018-05-09T00:04:57","slug":"the-princess-in-pasadena","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/2017\/03\/21\/the-princess-in-pasadena\/","title":{"rendered":"THE PRINCESS IN PASADENA"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0first stop on\u00a0my\u00a0road trip extraordinaire\u00a0was\u00a0Pasadena, California, to visit one of my oldest friends and her family. Normally I would have stayed in her house\u00a0had she not recently lost her mother to cancer and after being away from her own family for months caring for her mother. I\u00a0didn’t want to add another person she\u00a0needed to “care for,” so I rented an AirBnB nearby.<\/p>\n

Whenever I go onto AirBnB I\u00a0try to find one that either has character (ie: old) or is in an historic neighborhood. I found a great studio to rent\u00a0in the top floor of an historic Greene & Greene house. I jumped at the word “historic,” and my brother-in-law Jason jumped at the words “Greene & Greene.\u201d Apparently these brothers\u00a0designed\u00a0some amazing houses back in the early 1900s and as a devoted\u00a0woodworker by hobby, Jason might\u00a0have even had a little drool forming in the corner of his mouth.<\/p>\n

Meena was the most gracious of hosts; she gave me a complete tour when I got there and pointed out every convenience and amenity stocked in the room (and there were a lot, from every kind of sundry to Campbell’s soup and\u00a0fruit cups). When I came\u00a0home late one night, she had even wrapped up\u00a0a fresh breakfast pastry and left it on the stairs leading to my\u00a0room. On my last morning there I asked her if she would like to have coffee together so she could tell me about her historic house (and so I could report back to\u00a0Jason)\u00a0She invited me to come down and sit together in her front room.<\/p>\n

Meena is a very intelligent and stylish Indian woman in her mid-60s with a matter-of-fact demeanor and a quiet kindness. She is also a princess. No, really, she is a bona fide<\/em>\u00a0princess. Her grandfather was the last king of India before the country gained its independence.\u00a0Her whole family ruled all over the nation, governors of provinces and mayors, etc, and she was raised in opulent wealth and private schools. But when\u00a0Meena\u00a0was 15 years old, and with only $7.50 in her pocket, she fled the country.<\/p>\n

Her father had long arranged a marriage for her\u00a0that would provide a lucrative alliance. But\u00a0despite her many protests, the law stated daughters were\u00a0essentially\u00a0chattel “owned” by their\u00a0fathers.\u00a0Every day for\u00a0a year Meena\u00a0would take whatever pocket change she had been given and exchange it into dollars in order to buy herself a plane ticket. She forged her mother\u2019s signature to get a passport, a fact over which\u00a0she still seemed to harbor a shred of guilt as she said that unfortunately she had to resort to\u00a0“criminal” actions. \u00a0Having acquired\u00a0her ticket, she\u00a0left a note for her parents that simply read, “I have gone. Don’t look for me,” and\u00a0boarded a plane to Zurich.<\/p>\n

She survived scraping by and on the few dollars the only\u00a0family member she\u00a0confided in would send her. She\u00a0also had to stay hidden as her family immediately dispatched men\u00a0to find her and bring her back\u00a0(remember the whole chattel thing?). She was able\u00a0to evade discovery and eventually work her way to England. There, she attended university, became an economist, worked for the World Bank, and lived all over the globe.<\/p>\n

Eventually she returned to England\u00a0and worked for the London Underground where she met Bryan, an Englishman and her husband now of nearly 30\u00a0years. Since getting married,\u00a0she and Bryan have been rejected by family and often alienated at\u00a0corporate and societal events because, as she explains, “Bryan is a tall white man and I am a small brown woman.” \u00a0But the two\u00a0have survived the bumps and scrapes together. She told me\u00a0relationships are first about lust, then love, then companionship, and then longevity.\u00a0But people, she went on, don\u2019t see\u00a0marriage as an investment \u2013 between\u00a0equal shareholders \u2013 and that the markets will go up and down. Meena\u00a0repeated the adage that a\u00a0happy\u00a0marriage should feel\u00a0like \u201chand in glove,\u201d but she\u00a0prefers the metaphor of very comfortable smoking slippers.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Front yard garden from the porch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before I\u00a0had to go, she showed me her front yard garden. Because of the water shortage,\u00a0Meena\u00a0had replaced the plants a few years back not only\u00a0with\u00a0drought-friendly\u00a0plants but also with wild\u00a0fruit and berry bushes. She\u00a0said\u00a0when drought comes, the plants die and the small animals have nothing to eat. She figures she’ll let the\u00a0trees feed the birds and squirrels, but\u00a0her berry bushes will feed\u00a0the rest of the critters. It\u2019s not about animal activism, she explained; it\u2019s just about taking care of the ecosystem around her. Trust me,\u00a0any guest of\u00a0Meena’s is part that\u00a0ecosystem.<\/p>\n

I could never have guessed that my\u00a0AirBnB host was\u00a0a princess, a refugee, an economist, a wife, and now she had become a friend. My morning with Meena reminded me of what Alex Haley, author of the classic\u00a0book,\u00a0Roots,\u00a0<\/em>said,\u00a0“Every time an old\u00a0person dies, it\u2019s like a\u00a0library burning\u00a0down.” What he meant was the stories\u00a0that make up\u00a0the life of just one person\u00a0could fill a library full of books. I suppose that is one of the reasons why I love to hear and tell stories so much. If we don’t get to know people around us, sit and listen to their stories, their\u00a0books will be\u00a0lost forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0first stop on\u00a0my\u00a0road trip extraordinaire\u00a0was\u00a0Pasadena, California, to visit one of my oldest friends and her family. Normally I would have stayed in her house\u00a0had she not recently lost her mother to cancer and after being away from her own family for months caring for her mother. I\u00a0didn’t want to add another person she\u00a0needed to “care […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-golden-state","post_format-post-format-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/storygirlontheroad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Pasadena-Princess-home-e1490120213256.jpg?fit=617%2C444&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8xsVh-D","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1118,"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/1118"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storygirlontheroad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}