Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents don’t suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager.
And so, instead of saying Ashoke’s name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as “Are you listening to me?
I’m scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It’s a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life.
She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see.
But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost.
He regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life.
It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem. And so he left the tears and fury in Milan and took the train down to Rome.
And she refused to go to that miserable place he had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable.
Like certain faces among the people I see on the street every day, certain words, for some reason, stand out, and leave an impression on me. Others remain in the background, negligible. After.
A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.
The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember.
She calculates the Indian time on her hands. The tip of her thumb strikes each rung of the brown ladders etched onto the backs of her fingers, then stops at the middle of the third: it is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past eight.
They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera. I.
They were all like siblings, Mr. Kapasi thought as they passed a row of date trees. Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents.
I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my student to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.
I hope you don’t mind my asking,” Douglas said, “but I noticed the statue outside, and are you guys Christian? I thought you were Indian.
He waited for chaotic games to end, for shouts to subside. His favorite moments were when he was alone, or felt alone. Lying in bed in the morning, watching sunlight flickering like a restless bird on the wall.
No parent ever called a child by his good name. Good names had no place within a family.
I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal... It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time.
Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I’m trying to get away from something, to free myself. I’ve been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I’ve been transformed, almost reborn.