The Elopement: How much is too much to trade for a promise of love?

WHEN AMERICAN-BORN Karin Malhotra elopes to Ireland from Durham, North Carolina, with her college sweetheart, she botches the dreams her parents had for her when they left New Delhi with a stalwart philosophy on what a good life “ought” to be. “Opportunity,” her father said, “is in the U.S. That’s why we came.”

But finding herself in Ireland, juxtaposed in not one, but two additional cultures (her new husband is Japanese), Karin finds herself thinking about the early years of her own parents’ married lives, and wondering if, like her, they questioned their decision to leave everything familiar for the mere promise of a better life. She tumbles headlong without any preparation into a small village in the corner of Ireland. Not only does she have to contend with a new suite of social mores, she wonders what it would have been like had she not quit home.

THE STORY CAPTURED THE ATTENTION of a local station of National Public Radio not many days after its online publication. On their website archives of the interview, NPR wrote: Dipika Kohli married her college sweetheart on New Year’s Day in 2001. The two eloped in Japan, then moved to Ireland to start life in a place unfamiliar to both of them. In doing so, she boldly walked away from the hopes her parents had for her. They emigrated from New Delhi with much more conventional dreams of a successful life for their daughter. “The Elopement” (Kismuth/2012) is Kohli’s memoir of the risks she took to carve her own path in life. Listen to the story here >

What people are saying about the book…

• • “Dipika is a[n] author who clearly has been writing for years. Her ability to illustrate a particular moment, object, or emotion is amazing. Her writing style is different than what I am accustomed to reading. Its almost poetic. As the reader you can expect to gain insight into the mind, heart and soul of a Woman who lives life passionately and purposely. Also, Dipika does a nice job at outlining the good and not so pretty reality of what it means to defy cultural norms.” —Anonymous, Amazon Kindle review

  • “Her writing style mirrors that of her blog, Kismuth, the practical infused with the mystical, perhaps reflecting the duality of the cultures in which she was raised… She faced her own reactions everywhere from a quiet, and sometimes lonely, Irish cottage to flying a kite by herself at lunchtime over Lake Crabtree, desperate to get away from a mindset that didn’t suit her.” —Aaron Mandel, The Clarion Content