Saleem Peeradina was born in Mumbai (then Bombay) in India on October 5, 1944, to Habib and Noorunnisa Peeradina. He displayed an extraordinary talent in art, painting, and reading from a very early age. A graduate of St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, he completed a master’s degree in English literature from Bombay University in 1969. In 1973, he went to the USA to complete another master’s degree from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. Soon after his graduation, Peeradina returned to India and became the director and teacher at Sophia College, Bombay, in 1980. He initiated open classroom teaching in the college and taught creative writing in the open air. As a teacher, he supported originality and imagination over learning by heart. Constant attention and appreciation created in Peeradina a desire for approval and success. However, his vigor for being the best was kept under check by his critical father, whose attempts were misread by young Saleem to undermine his talents. He kept on working hard to prove him wrong. His dislike for his father made him choose every opportunity to separate himself from his patriarch, first in 1971 to do another Master’s in the USA with a Fulbright travel grant, and then in 1988 in the scholar exchange program to Michigan, and finally in 1989 to work as an Associate Professor at Siena Heights University.