Miss Kay

by Kaj Fölster

At the age of 19, Kaj Fölster travels with a cargo ship from Genoa to India, through the Suez Canal. Almost 60 years later she finds the diary she kept during the voyage. Onboard the ship the young Kaj meets an eclectic group of people: a colonial teaplanter, a weather-beaten field marshal, a diving history professor, a liberated missionary-wife with three children and a mermaid held captive in the captain’s apartment.

These people teach her to distrust clichés and prejudices, and to sharpen her senses to life‘s biggest questions: Morality and its double standards, constraint and the longing for freedom, religious delusions, responsibility and suffering. Destinies and philosophical reflections are coupled with adventurous stories about sunken cities, pirate fates, the remarkable journey of the Statue of Liberty, the Englishmens’ deceit against Arab countries and the humanism of Indian philosophers.

Kaj Fölster (1936) is a writer and Social Studies graduate. She has a Master’s Degree from the University of Delhi in India, a Social Studies degree from the Social Institute in Stockholm and a official degree from the University in Göttingen, Germany. She has been living in Germany, where she has worked with womens’ rights and sociopolitical development and has also been politically active. She has authored the books De tre löven and Bortom de sju Bergen – tyska bilder 1954-1994.

September 2008