ABSTRACT
One evening after dinner, as we lounged around her hostel room watching TV, Anjali, then a 19-year-old college student in the South Indian city of Chennai, told me she dreamed every night of Addis Ababa. Anjali came from an erudite Protestant family in Kerala on India’s Western Coast and like many girls I met from that region, she held that she was “not just an Indian, but a Christian.” The latter gestured to a wider, more international geography of belonging. On this day, she told me that her own story had begun in erstwhile Burma, sometime in the 1940s, when her grandmother, a nurse from Kerala, met her Bengali grandfather, an Anglican preacher, both having travelled there with India’s Student Christian Movement. So besotted with her was he that he followed her to Kerala and eventually married her, settling down to preach at a small parish near Eranakulam, many hundred miles away from his home.
