On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.
She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family’s heritage, another to hear it from him.
He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.
One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.
The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters-it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too son and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
Do what I will never do.
She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.
She has the gift of accepting her life.
She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time.
The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.
It’s easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.
It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.
I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for ‘The Namesake,’ I felt that it had to be a novel – it couldn’t work as a story.
With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before.
The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.
When I sit down to write, I don’t think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It’s like staring at the mirror all day.
She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.