TALES AND TRAILS

Tales and Trails: Texas and Beyond is a travel memoir that transcends geography to become a meditation on memory, migration, and belonging. What began as a family journey across the United States slowly unfolded into a deeper exploration of history, folklore, and the human instinct to survive and protect.

Travelling with my family through Texas, Washington, D.C., New York, and New England, I found that each landmark and landscape offered more than spectacle—it invited dialogue with the past and reflection on the present. The Texan plains evoked the enduring spirit of cowboys: grit, resilience, and multicultural roots that shaped a uniquely American identity. Washington’s monuments and New York’s layered histories spoke of ambition, struggle, and renewal, while the colonial towns of New England stirred thoughts on progress, memory, and our shared human story.

Yet the book is not only about places. It is about how the ordinary moments of travel—walking side by side, sharing silence, witnessing shadows fall across stone—can carry extraordinary meaning. Travel here becomes a mirror, showing us who we are and how cultures, memories, and instincts connect across time and geography.

Interwoven with these journeys are threads of folklore and memory. Encounters with Halloween traditions in Texas resonated with stories from my childhood in Kerala: the spectral lady by the pond and the legendary Kadamattathu Kathanar, protector against unseen forces. Though separated by continents and centuries, both traditions reveal a shared human instinct—to safeguard loved ones, to endure, and to seek meaning in the face of the unknown.

Nature, too, has a presence in this narrative. From the wildlife sanctuaries of Fossil Rim to reflections on the Sahara’s desert dust fertilising the Amazon, the book underscores how survival is not only human but collaborative, interwoven between people, cultures, and ecosystems.

Through this hybrid form of storytelling—part travel memoir, part historical reflection, part cultural meditation—Tales and Trails invites readers to see beyond surface journeys. It highlights migration not only as movement across borders, but as a continuum of cultural memory and heritage carried through generations.

Ultimately, this book is about discovering the sacred in the simple. It is about learning to witness rather than merely observe, to find connections between distant lands and familiar memories, and to honour the quiet truths that shape our shared humanity. More than a travelogue, it is a journey across landscapes of history, folklore, and family, reminding us that the extraordinary often lies hidden within the everyday.