Barbara Horscraft had just given up a career in teaching when she met 19-year-old Indian named Mahaveer Jain at a hotel in Jodhpur, India.
The boy took her to his home on a Vespa scooter so she could see the items he wanted to sell, including a religious painting called a pawaya. Horscraft, who had just started an import business in Santa Cruz, bought a few things from him.
But when she got home, the boy called her frantically to ask that she send the painting back. He had just discovered it was stolen, he said. Horscraft packaged up the item and sent it back to him.
Years later, on another buying trip to India for her Santa Cruz store, Gravago, the owner of the large export businesses where she shopped offered to drive Horscraft back to her hotel.
Sitting in the back of his limousine, the elegantly dressed man turned and asked Horscraft if she remembered who he was.
"You changed the course of my life," he told her. If she had not sent back the painting, he would have been in prison instead of owning one of the largest export businesses in India, he said.
It's just one of the stories Horscraft has collected from her travels around the world; stories of sinking into village life in India, riding a swaying bus through Afghanistan and once fending off a group of drunken men who believed that, because she was traveling alone, she was for sale.
There are stories too in the colorful rugs, inlaid mirrors and shining vases she sells in her narrow storefront off Cooper Street: the smiling wooden lion that came from a children's merry-go-round in India in the late 19th century. The settee upholstered with camel skin that the nomadic Tuaregs of Africa decorated and once used for water carriers in the Sahara. The rugs she bought from a man in India who wanted to explain the complete history of natural dyes before he would allow her to buy.
It is something the slightly built woman with the curling blond hair has always loved: histories big and small.
It is a topic she was drawn to, studying history in college and teaching it in school. She loves the politics of history, the dark underpinnings, the mysterious details.
"I've always liked the intrigue of history," she says.
She wanders through her store telling the history of a girl who yearned to travel, of a woman who did just that; running a hand over the history of faraway lives in all the things she sells.
The boy took her to his home on a Vespa scooter so she could see the items he wanted to sell, including a religious painting called a pawaya. Horscraft, who had just started an import business in Santa Cruz, bought a few things from him.
But when she got home, the boy called her frantically to ask that she send the painting back. He had just discovered it was stolen, he said. Horscraft packaged up the item and sent it back to him.
Years later, on another buying trip to India for her Santa Cruz store, Gravago, the owner of the large export businesses where she shopped offered to drive Horscraft back to her hotel.
Sitting in the back of his limousine, the elegantly dressed man turned and asked Horscraft if she remembered who he was.
"You changed the course of my life," he told her. If she had not sent back the painting, he would have been in prison instead of owning one of the largest export businesses in India, he said.
It's just one of the stories Horscraft has collected from her travels around the world; stories of sinking into village life in India, riding a swaying bus through Afghanistan and once fending off a group of drunken men who believed that, because she was traveling alone, she was for sale.
There are stories too in the colorful rugs, inlaid mirrors and shining vases she sells in her narrow storefront off Cooper Street: the smiling wooden lion that came from a children's merry-go-round in India in the late 19th century. The settee upholstered with camel skin that the nomadic Tuaregs of Africa decorated and once used for water carriers in the Sahara. The rugs she bought from a man in India who wanted to explain the complete history of natural dyes before he would allow her to buy.
It is something the slightly built woman with the curling blond hair has always loved: histories big and small.
It is a topic she was drawn to, studying history in college and teaching it in school. She loves the politics of history, the dark underpinnings, the mysterious details.
"I've always liked the intrigue of history," she says.
She wanders through her store telling the history of a girl who yearned to travel, of a woman who did just that; running a hand over the history of faraway lives in all the things she sells.
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