<P>Ayya’s Accounts explores the life of an ordinary man–orphan, refugee, shopkeeper, and grandfather–during a century of hope and upheaval in India. Born in colonial India into a despised caste of former tree climbers, Ayya lost his mother as a child and came of age in a small town in lowland Burma. Forced to flee at the outbreak of World War II, he returned to southern India after a treacherous 1,700-mile journey by rail, boat, bullock cart, and foot. There he became a successful fruit merchant and helped many of his descendants get settled in the United States. Ayya’s story underscores the luck, nerve, subterfuge, and sorrow that he encountered along his precarious route of advancement. Emerging out of tales told to his American grandson, Ayya’s Accounts embodies a simple faith—that the story of a place as large and complex as modern India can be told through the life of a single individual.</P>