I started writing the Tales of Tandaria stories when I was living in India. At that time, my job was to perform demographic studies of the effectiveness of India’s Family Planning program. I had to answer such touchy questions as, was the program having a positive effect on reducing the birth rate (back in the distant past, this was India’s big problem), was it helping the Indian people gain more control over their family’s welfare, and was the program producing any unintended negative consequences. I’d like to think that my research surveys helped make the health program more successful and of beneficial to the people of India.
But conducting population and health surveys only took up part of my time. I also spent a lot of my time travelling around India…not just to Delhi, but up to Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kashmir, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh. I even had the opportunity to travel to Maharashtra and Bombay (now called Mumbai).
It was a writer’s dream. I was inspired to write the Tales of Tandaria when I lived and worked in Rajasthan, the closest thing to America’s Wild West that you will find on the Subcontinent. The castles, palaces, and wild vistas of Rajasthan became the basis for Tandaria. Much of the first and second books of the Tales of Tandaria series were written while I was sitting on the verandah of a guest house in Dharamsala, looking out over the plains of Punjab.
Once I returned to the United States, I sat on my writing endeavors for many years. Then, when I retired, I dusted off those initial typed pages, entered them onto a computer, and looked for a publisher. I was fortunate that MisquePress decided to take a chance on my endeavors. Now I hope you will find the stories as fascinating to read as I found them to write, so many years ago in the midst of one of the most beautiful countries in the world.