The moment of migration is not singular, of course, but part of the string of moments, as the universe is composed (it seems now) of strings, each looped to the next in inextricable continuity. Rupture the strings, and you create a black hole. A journey is only a place to start the story; the human story. And we migrants are not merely curiosities

Living in San Francisco, where a new yoga studio seems to open up every month, I am tempted to forget that other America which regarded anything foreign with suspicion, where half an hour of yoga and meditation in our public-school classroom had our town's delegation of the Christian right raging.

Often San Francisco is enough; but equally often, my questioner wants more. No, I mean, where are you really from?

And yet, to migrate away from a community of migrants is to experience a particular kind of disorientation, a dual displacement. To free oneself from a family already in free-float means taking in a heady rush of air, the illusion of being an individual. One forgets the original nature of the longing, deep-rooted, almost atavistic, for clan, tribe,

The marriage ruling led to two years of a massive satyagraha campaign. After thousands of arrests, strikes, police crackdowns, and even some deaths, the government and the protesters reached a compromise: the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which restored some rights.

When I learned English, he said,—"refrigerator" was a very hard word. But I learned it. You have only one word to learn, not a whole language. I think you can learn to say "Bhupendra."

On April 3, the marchers spent the night in Navsari—just twelve miles north of Narotam's village. Nine thousand gathered to hear Gandhi speak, according to the police; fifty thousand, said the pro-independence newspaper. Navsari's population was less than twenty-five thousand, but people came from all the villages around. The speech was given in th

The Pegging Act of 1943, passed in a hysteria over supposed Indian "penetration" into the white areas of Durban, temporarily halted all property sales from one race to another. The Asiatic Land Tenure Act of 1946 strengthened it and made it permanent. Dubbed by Indians "the Ghetto Act," the 1946 legislation allowed the governmen

These days, when Hollywood debutantes sport Bollywood fashions and "chai tea" is available at every Starbucks, it is hard to remember the America where I grew up: an America where people did not recognize our ethnicity, where we were constantly mistaken for black or Hispanic or anything but ourselves, where when we said "Indian,"