Thirty Dollars and A Dream

Born in the chaos of India's 1947 Partition and orphaned at twelve by his mother's death from cancer, Madhu Mehra grew up in the narrow lanes of Old Delhi's Chhipiwara, surrounded by temple bells, monkey-roofed peepal trees, and the quiet resilience of a displaced Hindu family.

At twenty-one, clutching just thirty dollars and a one-way steamer ticket, he boarded the ageing SS Sirdhana in Bombay and sailed into the unknown. What followed was an extraordinary overland odyssey across the Middle...