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
Ele sente uma dor agradável nas têmporas e uma repentina gratidão pelo dia e pelo lugar aonde este dia lhe trouxe.
Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I’m trying to get away from something, to free myself. I’ve been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I’ve been transformed,...
Did you have to try for a while? He thought it a bold question, coming from a stranger. But he was honest with her, his thoughts still loose from the spiked lemonade. Would you believe, with Maya it h...
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...
Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.
As Mr. Sen backed out of the parking lot, he put his arm across the top of the front seat, so that it looked as if he had his arm around Mrs. Sen.
And yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in w...
And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the...
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...
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...
She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day’s headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At ev...
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 so many ways, his family’s life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another.
In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another...They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spen...
I have terrible urges, Mr. Kapasi, to throw things away. One day I had the urge to throw everything I own out the window, the television, the children, everything. Don’t you think it’s unhealthy?
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 tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.
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...
