Katherine Russell Rich has written for the New York Times magazine, Salon, NPR, the Washington Post, and O magazine. Her first book was The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer—and Back. Her second, Dreaming in Hindi, about a year she spent in India learning to speak Hindi, is out from Houghton Mifflin this July.
This is a story about how appearing bald on the cover of a book led to my getting punched repeatedly by middle-aged women in India. No, actually, that’s not exactly…