Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

They used to joke about it. A marriage of late-stage capitalism, they said. They couldn’t afford to both work to make the world a better place, right? One of them had to pay the bills and make the world slightly worse. It might balance out, their karma.

H]uman beings need all the relatives they can get–as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

. . .

When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings

She must abandon the paternal fire, and henceforth invoke that of the husband. She must abandon her religion, practice other rites, and pronounce other prayers. She must give up the god of her infancy, and put herself under the protection of a god whom she knows not. Let her not hope to remain faithful to the one while honoring the other; for in th

We adapted in ways that made sense to my parents, letting go of cultural traditions that were no longer practical while holding on to the customs and practices that were important to them.