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

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 rules, there was only anarchy.

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 before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

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

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

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

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. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.