Deepti Naval Instagram – As we celebrate INDIA BEING ON THE MOON, I go back to a memory from the seventeenth year of my life . . . Excerpt from my book – A COUNTRY CALLED CHILDHOOD – —- 20 July 1969 was a landmark date. The newspapers flaunted an extraordinary headline: ‘Man Lands on the Moon.’ It was reported that Neil Armstrong, the American astronaut, commander of the Apollo 11 manned lunar mission, had walked on the moon. Nearly 240,000 miles away from Earth, Armstrong spoke these words to more than a billion people listening at home: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ That night when I slept on the terrace, I looked at the moon with new eyes. Metaphors seemed to shift, drift away and new images started to appear in the night sky. As I lay awake, my thoughts were thousands and thousands of miles away. All I could think of was man’s first slow, bouncy step on the surface of the moon. From there, they drifted to the time when Piti had gone to America in the year 1961. Upon his return I had engraved with a knitting needle on the whitewashed pillar of the veranda, my address— Deepti Naval Chandraavali Katra Sher Singh Hall Bazaar Amritsar India World Universe Cosmos SPACE It was Piti who had first noticed the inscription 
‘Who has written this address?’ he asked. 
‘It is Deepi’s doing,’ replied Mama.
‘Achcha, achcha,’ he said with a faint smile before becoming thoughtful.
 Years later, in America, he told me it was when he’d read my writing on the pillar, that he’d made up his mind to leave Amritsar, emigrate to the US, and provide for his children a wider stage on which to enact their lives. #chandrayaan3🚀