Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from and I am lucky to be part of it.

The publishing world is very timid. Readers are much braver.