Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear. -When Mr. Pirzada Came t...
She'd convinced herself that Subhash was her rival, and that she was in competition for him for Bela, a competition that felt insulting, unjust. But of course it had not been a competition, it had bee...
It's easier to surrender to confinement.
I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I do...
Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients....
You got cats at home?No cats. Only a husband.
And she refused to go to that miserable place he had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable.
My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very awa...
Une langue étrangère, c'est comme un muscle frêle, délicat. Si l'on ne s'en sert pas, il s'affaiblit.
In so many ways, his family’s life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. It had started with his father’s train wreck, paralyzing him at first, late...
But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, t...
He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made h...
When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive.
I see the people who have lived here forever. They walk quickly, indifferent to the buildings. They cross the squares without stopping. I
Eventually he begins to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tries it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i's. He wonders how...
I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daughter, is freedom. That is my mission. A sense of liberty, the liberty that comes not only from self-a...
No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waiting for the situation to change.
Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we...
I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.