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.

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

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

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.

Dullness is a kind of luxury.

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

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