Sublime

The Paper Millionaire, by some Arab-turned-Englishman named Roger Shashoua. He sat

By the time of the census of 2000, 1.9 million people of South Asian origin—Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan—were living in the United States. Of these, one in five lived in California, and their profile was now more diverse than that of the 1960s brain-drain generation. Unlike their suburban professional predecessors, the working-cla

In the late 1990s, the national media were abuzz with stories of South Asian immigrants to California: the H-1B visa holders, the brilliant computer scientists and engineers from the subcontinent who were flocking to Silicon Valley to be part of the Internet revolution. Their story merged with, and seemed a natural sequel to, the saga of the brain-

Middlesex County, New Jersey, where we went to see the movie, is home to one of the highest concentrations of people of Indian origin in the United States. And since the United States is now the country outside South Asia with the most Indians in the world, Nainesh and his peers might be said to be living at the epicenter of the diaspora.

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 brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty.