Moving a beloved home in India more than 2,000 km to save it

San Francisco

WHEN George Oommen was 16 years old, he inherited a two-storey house on a river in Mepral, a village in the verdant southern Indian state of Kerala, where his father had grown up.

By tradition, the house was always passed to the youngest son, which he was. But it wasn't a house he needed or wanted. He was a teenager, living with his family in Delhi. After college, he moved to the United States to study at Harvard, where he worked for three decades as an architect. Ten years ago, he became a full-time abstract painter.