Meet Me in Mumbai: A Memoir 

By Lovelace Cook 

Whisperwood Publishing, 2023 

Paper: $19.99 

Memoir 

Reviewed by Lenore Vickrey 

I’ve long had a desire to drop everything and travel to some remote part of the world to taste new foods, breathe the air, meet the native people, and immerse myself in a foreign culture. Not an extended trip, mind you, but enough to get a feel for another part of the planet that I could document with photos and create new memories. So far, I haven’t done it, but I feel like I accomplished it at least vicariously while reading Lovelace Cook’s memoir, “Meet Me in Mumbai.”  

A Fairhope resident, the author uses her personal experience with a British lover as the basis for the book, which uses fictional names for both. She is Jesse, he is Trevor. After meeting the traveling Englishman in Fairhope and falling in love, he leaves, but she agrees to meet him in India. As she writes in the prologue, “It was time to get out of my comfort zone.” Boy, does she ever. Cook takes us on her journey through India, enduring food poisoning, bug bites, rashes, toilets that don’t flush, no air-conditioning, crowds, beggars, and other indignities. She survives and agrees to another trek with Trevor, this time meeting him in his native England, where another set of misadventures in Cornwall follows, made worse after she breaks her ankle while hiking. But she recovers and returns home, vowing never to visit India again. And yet she does, this time to cities where she’s able to see the Taj Majal and other sites and eventually comes to realize that her travels have become part of a spiritual journey: “I saw the real India, in contrast to glossy tourist brochures, and I was grateful.” All the while, there are the expected conflicts between the couple, making me wonder at times, “Why is she putting up with this guy?”  

Amazingly, Jesse and Trevor continue traveling together, this time throughout Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Her visit to the Genocide Museum in Cambodia near the infamous Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge murdered up to 20,000 people, confirmed for me that country would not be on my bucket list. Nor would a visit to Vietnam, where thoughts of the Vietnam War haunted her thoughts and names like China Beach, Hamburger Hill, Danang, and Hanoi became more than headlines of the 1960s and 1970s, but “cities, villages, towns with people whose lives had been shattered by the war.” 

The book has a handy glossary with definitions of many of the words and expressions the author encountered, from brolly (umbrella in the UK) to samosa (a fried snack in India). There’s also a map of India with their destination cities marked, making me wish there were maps of the other countries as well. I’d also liked to have seen photos from their trips, but since this is a fictional work based on Cook’s real-life adventures, maybe that wouldn’t have worked.  

I’ll not reveal how the book ends, but as I turned the last page, I wanted to stand up and applaud the author for taking this incredible journey, especially in her later years, and then living to tell about it. I might not have anyone to meet in Mumbai, but after reading Lovelace Cook’s memoir, I don’t want to put off those bucket list trips any longer. 

 

Lenore Vickrey is editor of Alabama Living, the official publication of the rural electric cooperatives in Alabama, and an avid reader.