As strange as it seemed, I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, that mine would affect her.
Tour guide tells them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again.
Years ago, Dr. Grant had helped her to put what she felt into words. She’d told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She sai...
What had Subhash told Bela, to keep her away? Nothing, probably. It was the just punishment for her crime. She understood now what it meant to walk away from her child. It had been her own act of kill...
War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war,
Then again, how could he expect Bela to be interested in marriage, given the example he and Gauri had given? They were a family of solitaries. They had collided and dispersed. This was her legacy. If...
It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied...
In my case there is another distance, another schism. I don’t know Bengali perfectly. I don’t know how to read it, or even write it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I’ve always per...
In a sense, I'm used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuou...
If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words.
I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have trav...
I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste tha...
He was blind to self-constraints, like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors.
Everything has to be reconsidered, shaped anew. Autobiographical fiction, even if it is inspired by reality, by memory, requires a rigorous selection, a merciless cutting. One writes with the pen, but...
Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian
Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that...
But you don’t wear an engagement ring. I don’t have one. He studied the bangle, turning it slowly around. What kind of man proposes without a ring? She explained, then, that there had not been a propo...
Avoiding puddles, stepping over mats of hyacinth leaves that remained in place. Breathing the dank air.
Style but
I realize that it’s impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For