Louise Farrell was homesick. She had seen hundreds of examples of ancient architecture, mosques, and Hindu shrines. She was bone-tired and irritable, tired of the culture, the filth and poverty, the red dirt piled about everywhere, the crowds of humanity, and the odor of chapattis being baked over cow dung fires. Truth be said, she was eager to return to the clean, wide-open spaces of the Flint Hills of Kansas.

Although her husband Richard had been told that no one could capture the essence of India in the written word, he had notebooks filled with his impressions of the history,...