After leaving India and circumnavigating the globe for years on a cargo ship, Kavita Gursahani was looking forward to finally docking In Marseilles, France to begin a new life. After 11 years, France is now her home.

Born and raised in Mumbai, India, 51-year-old Gursahani was the daughter of a district judge who frequently moved his wife and four children around the state of Maharashtra to perform his judiciary responsibilities.

After high school, she left Mumbai to attend Pune University, located less than 100 miles southeast of her hometown. Always an overachiever, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and minors in political science and psychology, and then started working on her master’s degree at the same university.

She found that she could do her second year in the program back home in Mumbai so she began teaching first grade at a local elementary school for experience but soon learned that teaching small children was not something she wanted to do all of her life.

By now she had completed her master’s degree at Pune University and decided that teaching was right for her, but at the university level, which meant continuing her education in Mumbai. She finished her master’s degree in philosophy in 1991, which was considered academically in India as a “mini” Ph.D.

Following graduation, the captain of a large container ship came into her life. She and Vijay were married in 1992 and Gursahani set off on an adventure around the world with her new husband. She sailed on massive container ships captained by her husband to many ports of call for almost seven years. Along the way, her daughter Keertana was born in 1995 and her son Youvraj was born in 2000.

Sailing was a wonderful life for the family, except for that small matter of the attempted kidnapping of her daughter while in port in the West African country of Guinea.

“It was horrible,” Gursahani remembered. “We were eating lunch and my daughter wanted to see the chief cook, which she often did. He was not there that day so she crossed the ship to the crew’s quarters where a local African man had joined the crew for lunch. She was about 23-months-old at the time and did not return. The local man had taken her and was just about to leave the ship with my daughter when the second officer came on deck and asked him what he was doing with the baby. The kidnapper told the first officer the baby wanted to leave with him, but the first officer realized what was happening and took the child from his arms and returned her to me. It was a very scary experience for all of us.”

By now, sailing the high seas was losing its appeal so her husband responded to a recruiter in Mumbai that wanted him to join a global shipping company that was based in Marseilles, France.

“I told my husband we would give it a try and if we do not like it, we can always return to India,” she said.

Her husband left for France in 2004 to complete his training. Gursahani, who had been teaching creating writing in Mumbai, followed with the kids in 2005.

“I thought I might be able to teach in a French school when I arrived but my language skills just were not developed well enough,” she said. “I had taken language classes for four months in Mumbai before our move but the local Marseilles accent was difficult to learn.”