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.

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

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

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive.

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 the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.

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

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