Long commute worth it for the food alone

By Brendan Buhler

Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008 | 2 a.m.

When Stacy Standley went to India, he didn’t know much about it. Little things, like which hemisphere it was in (the northern).

Or the food — he didn’t know much about the food, but what he’d heard wasn’t good. So, in the spirit of exploration, he packed a bottle of Tabasco sauce inside a roll of toilet paper and figured he was set at either end.

Now, 32 years later, Standley has an Indian wife and an Indian dog and lives half of his life in India. He’s fascinated by the country’s people, its history and, oh, the food ...

Does that strike you as odd?

“It was more abnormal when we lived in Aspen and my wife was the only Indian in the town,” Standley says.

Standley used to be the mayor of Aspen. In fact, that was in the 1970s, right before he went to a skiing conference in the Himalayas (which he’s since also visited on a bike).

A few years later he moved to Nepal, where he marketed adventure traveling. Then there was a Delhi consulting business, which later led to renewable energy, after which he took a job with the World Wildlife Fund (in Geneva, part time) and eventually retired, only to be lured back into business by family members who wanted to import (into India) auto supplies, including the chemicals for waterless car washing.

Oh, and somewhere back there, in 1994, the lifelong bachelor met and married his wife, Chand-Sikand. They got a dog, an English Labrador, who was Indian by birth.

The dog is named Scooter, after the three-wheeled auto rickshaws that careen heedlessly through India’s streets. Scooter moved like that when he was a puppy.

Anyway, wife and dog followed Standley from Aspen-Delhi to Geneva-Delhi to Aspen-Delhi again. But then, a couple of years ago, it was time for a change. Aspen was out and Vegas was in.

(Standley, with a lifelong love of the American West, ruled out the East Coast and, on principle, Los Angeles.)

“My wife just could not get into living in Colorado,” Standley says. “A Delhi girl just cannot get used to snow.”

Of course, when the Standleys were splitting his time between Aspen and Delhi, in a good year it could be winters in Delhi and summers in Aspen and never too far away from 70 degrees.

Now?

“Vegas and Delhi have very, very similar climates,” Standley says.

He sighs.