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

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

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

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 contemporary New Yorker.

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?

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