Sublime

But another piece of our demographic condition in that moment, uncounted and unaccounted for, was loneliness. Among immigrant groups, Indo-Americans were the most geographically dispersed. Rarely did the researchers find Indians concentrated in specific, urban neighborhoods, and these too were relatively small. For the most part, while Cubans congr

Eventually she begins to disappear into furniture, against walls, her bare ends blending into things like the end of a brushstroke. Perhaps this is the reason they begin to forget that she is there; they cannot find her edges, the parts of her to pull out from the background to identify her by. They walk past her, talk through her, and are surprise

Even after the ringing stopped, the sound of the bell lingered in the indoor evening gloom like dust floating in the air.

To my father's people, America was uncharted territory—a country where few of their kind had ventured, where one might easily become, in the Gujarati idiom, lost. Poiro khowai jahe, the boy will become lost, busybodies warned his mother. "Lost" meant to become rootless, tailless; to forget the ways of the clan. It was equivalent to anothe

I believed, in those years, that to be a good Indian girl meant to live entirely without sexual desire; that my longing itself, let alone any action to fulfill it, made me bad, wrong, and un-Indian. My entire understanding of my culture was that transmitted by my parents, who in turn passed on what they had been taught, at a level they considered a

In Kipling’s Mowgli stories, the connections between human and animal are complex and ultimately tragic. Mowgli is a link between his village people and the people of the jungle, and like all go-betweens, all liminal figures, he is torn between the two sides, torn apart. There is no common ground between the village and the jungle; they have turned

She came up here for college, but her daddy got cancer, and the farm got sold, and ends stopped meeting, and she had to drop out.