Sublime

I no longer wish to be Ann, or Marie, or even Gita. After half a lifetime of subtly Americanizing the pronunciation of my name, in the past year I have begun to say it the Gujarati way: Minal, mee-nalr. The vowels have a specific, rolling intonation; the final letter is a consonant that does not exist in English, somewhere in the borderland between

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By the turn of the millennium, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, which despite its inclusive name has always consisted mostly of Gujaratis, could boast that its members owned a full forty percent of the hotel and motel rooms in the United States. They had twenty thousand hotels with more than a million rooms, ranging from skid-row to hig

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In Uganda, as elsewhere, Indians—including Gujaratis—had formed a shopkeeper class. They became a prime target of the extreme and violent form of nationalism that the dictator espoused, their plight the most vivid and traumatic example of "pariah capitalism" that our diaspora had encountered. After the 1972 expulsion, thousands of refugee

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