Kuku: A Love Story.

AuthorGlastris, Paul
PositionEditor's Note - Kukula Kapoor Glastris - Editorial

I remember, with unusual clarity, the first time I met Kukula Kapoor, the woman I would eventually marry. It was the winter of 1982.1 was a grad student at Northwestern University. She was an associate producer of a talk show on the Chicago PBS affiliate. We were both twenty-four. A mutual friend brought me by her rooming house in Evanston. Kuku made us tea on a hot plate. She talked fast, with an emotional intensity that I found almost worrying, though intriguing. I also noticed her exotic good looks: big eyes, cafe au lait skin, hair cut short Liza Minnelli style, and short shorts, too, revealing thin, shapely legs.

Ethnically, I couldn't quite place her. She looked Greek, like me, but while her first name sounded Greek, her last name definitely didn't. Turkish, maybe? Arab? During the conversation, she mentioned being "born in Tibet." Hmm, I thought, so that's what Tibetans look like.

Not quite. Over the next year, as we got to know each other--we were dating other people at the time but saw each other socially--I got a more accurate fix on her.

She had indeed been born in Tibet, but her father was an Indian diplomat who had helped the Dalai Lama escape and then took the same route himself--on ponyback over the Himalayas--with his family, including two-year-old Kuku. (She was named for the cuckoo bird singing outside the window the morning she was born.) A series of foreign postings followed: Switzerland and Germany (where her parents had previously been posted at the end of World War II); Senegal, where Kuku attended a Baptist missionary school and developed a love of all things American; Syria, where she witnessed dogfights between Israeli and Syrian jets; and then, finally, back to New Delhi, where she happily studied at a Catholic boarding school. She then attended Indiana University, where her aunt and uncle were on the faculty. She graduated with a degree in journalism and political science, and soon landed her TV job in Chicago, waiting tables at night to make ends meet.

I found her life story impossibly romantic--certainly way more so than my own childhood in suburban St. Louis. We were different in other ways, too. She was passionate; I was cerebral. She was a strong partisan Democrat, politically engaged by predisposition as well as background: her mother, a successful entrepreneur and diplomatic hostess, was a Congress Party activist who knew Indira Gandhi. I had no real political loyalties, my vaguely leftish inclinations balanced by a streak of middle-American conservatism I got from my parents. She revered journalists and journalism; I had no particular interest in the profession. (I don't remember ever reading a newspaper in college.)

I did have ambitions to be a writer, though, and soon learned that Kuku had a voracious appetite for fine fiction and a gift for language. I remember her once describing Norman Mailer, a guest on her TV show, as "walking like a pugilist, on the balls of his feet."

Eventually, I made my way to D.C., interned at the Washington Monthly, and caught the journalism bug. One wintery day in 1984, on a visit to Chicago, I called Kuku up. She invited me over to her place--she now had a one-bedroom apartment, with an actual kitchen--and cooked me a dinner of beef curry. We talked and talked and...

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