Through My Fiction, I Make Mainstream Readers

In Hindu Societies, Especially Overprotected Patriarchal Families Like Mine, Daughters Are Not At All Desirable. They Are Trouble. And A Mother Who, As Mine Did, Has Three Daughters, No Sons, Is Supposed To Go And Hang Herself, Kill Herself, Because It Is Such An Unlucky Kind Of Motherhood To Have.

Through My Fiction, I Make Mainstream Readers See The New Americans As Complex Human Beings, Not As Just The Other.

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.

In Other Words, My Literary Agenda Begins By Acknowledging That America Has Transformed Me. It Does Not End Until I Show How I (and The Hundreds Of Thousands Like Me) Have Transformed America.

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.