What Was The Duty Of The Teacher

I Had A 2-week Courtship With A Fellow Student In The Fiction Workshop In Iowa And A 5-minute Wedding In A Lawyer's Office Above The Coffee Shop Where We'd Been Having Lunch That Day. And So I Sent A Cable To My Father Saying, 'by The Time You Get This, Daddy, I'll Already Be Mrs. Blaise!'

The Picture Of Mother Teresa That I Remember From My Childhood Is Of A Short, Sari-wearing Woman Scurrying Down A Red Gravel Path Between Manicured Lawns. She Would Have In Tow One Or Two Slower-footed, Sari-clad Young Indian Nuns. We Thought Her A Freak. Probably Wed Picked Up On Unvoiced Opinions Of Our Loreto Nuns.

My First Novel, 'the Tiger's Daughter,' Embodies The Loneliness I Felt But Could Not Acknowledge, Even To Myself, As I Negotiated The No Man's Land Between The Country Of My Past And The Continent Of My Present.

But, Christ, There's A Difference Between Exotic And Foreign, Isn't There? Exotic Means You Know How To Use Your Foreignness, Or You Make Yourself A Little Foreign In Order To Appear Exotic. Real Foreign Is A Little Scary, Believe Me.

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.