All the Way to Heaven

by Stephen Alter

When Stephen Alter is asked the simple question Where are you from, originally? he hesitates. Although he is in most every way an American - granted with a trace of a British accent - he has an unexpected reply: My real home was in India, a hill station called Mussoorie, seven and a half thousand feet up the Himalayas. That was where I was born and raised, in a section known as Landour... The son and grandson of Presbyterian missionaries living in India for more than half a century, every day Alter straddled the profound boundary between utterly different peoples, cultures, languages, and religions. He and his brothers spoke a pidgin dialect of Hindustani and English as young boys, fished in rivers called the Song, the Ganga, and the Jumna, and later hunted for barking deer and ghoral in the steep foothills of the mountains looming always behind them. They studied American history but knew more about India's recent independence from England. In All the Way to Heaven, Alter pays loving