Anxieties About English
My mother was an English major. After earning her B.A. from a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, she started working on a Ph.D., also in English. R
A Thousand Words
On Writing the Acknowledgments
This month, I finish my Ph.D dissertation (a dissertation that is really speaking only the first draft of an eventual book, and therefore not “finished” at
Anatomy of a Mugging
On March 1st, when my daughter, Mrinalini, and I were coming home from school on a bright, late-winter afternoon, we were mugged. I use the word advisedly. Mugg
To My Uncle Shashi Tharoor on his 60th Birthday
I’m sorry I shut the window on your fingers, curved around the frame of the steel car door. It was an accident; I didn’t know how quickly the automatic glas
On the Difficulty of Making Friends
The scene is a winter party, Chicago, the year 2015. There are large platters of powdered cookies and plates of soft cheese. There is an eight-quart stockpot of
Snoring Shanmugam, and Other Cautionary Tales
I spend much of my time reading, always have. When I was in elementary school, I even read during recess, sitting alone by the tanbark box, hoping not to be hai
There Lived a Certain Man in Russia Long Ago
On a Friday night in Chennai in September 2015, we go with friends to drink gin and eat Jack Daniels chicken at 10 Downing Street. Styled as a British pub, 10 D
Chasing the Dissertation Mouse
He showed up in May, a flash of fur and tail that my husband mistook for a cockroach and my mother identified swiftly as a mouse. He came flying out of my home
A Letter to My Husband After My First Weekend Home Alone
You’re probably not supposed to feel elated when your husband and two year old leave on a family trip without you, but I did. Thursday, after I dropped you bo
The Order of Things
On June 25, four and a half months shy of her 99th birthday, my great-grandmother, M. (Mundarath) Jayasankhini, took her final sips of milk from the hands of he
You Lose It In A Generation
You lose it in a generation. My parents came to the United States young (my mother was a teenager) and separately. They met in upstate New York, in graduate sch
Fault Lines
In mid-March, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that there is a 7% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater hitting California in the next thirty y
