A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.

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

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.

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

In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.

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

But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.