In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhoo….

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?.

I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop wher….

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot..

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer,….

Mother Teresas detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context ….

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night bef….

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contempor….

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other..

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land b….

I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn't enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can't feel that I can make social….

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere..

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new pe….

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver t….

[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar..

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one's individuality..

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a coupl….

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without ….

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more tha….

In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, ….

I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. I….