Style but
Station on Cape Cod looks close to where you are. It’s in a place called Wellfleet.
Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he can not conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I ha...
When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You
Too much information, and yet, in her case, not enough. In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.
They don't understand why I want to take such a risk. These reactions don't surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threate...
They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera. I
The fact that the yellow chintz armchair in the living room clashed with the blue-and-maroon Turkish carpet no longer bothered her.
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times w...
She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.
She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time.
Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people. They
Other Bengalis gossiped about him and prayed their own children would not ruin their lives in the same way. And so he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributin...
Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry.
No parent ever called a child by his good name. Good names had no place within a family.
Maybe because from the creative point of view there is nothing so dangerous as security.
Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke’s name, she utters the interrogative that...
I’m scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It’s a language that they personify,...
In the months before coming to Italy, I was looking for another direction for my writing. I wanted a new approach. I didn’t know that the language I had studied slowly for many years in America would,...
I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my student to do when I teach creative writi...