Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

And as the number of "mixed" marriages grows, there is the difficulty of defining who "counts." At least one Khatri association has held a public debate on whether girls who marry outside the caste should continue to be invited to social events or, upon their deaths, be sent funeral wreaths from the caste association. This debat

Marrying and procreating beyond one's circle of birth is not, of course, unique to our community. The 2000 U.S. Census counted Americans of mixed race for the first time, and found 6.8 million of them, with a large percentage of those being children—quite remarkable for a nation where segregation and anti-miscegenation laws existed within living me

But in other ways, our experiences are completely different. Where I grew up as an invisible minority far away from any extended family, Minal and her sister have lived all their lives in an extensive network of community surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Owing to a completely different racial and colonial history, South Asian

In terms of the old push-pull model of migration, India's problems—population, pollution, corruption, poverty—are overwhelming; the push factors for emigration are as strong as ever. And as global television (Friends, The Bold and the Beautiful) and free trade (Domino's Pizza, Tommy Hilfiger) sell the tastes and pleasures of American lifestyles, th

"Without the British, none of us would be here," Minal's father told me—and included me in the statement, too, since, as he pointed out, without the British there would have been no Indians in Fiji, and without Fiji our grandparents could have never afforded to send my father to the United States to study.

Although I am more than twice her age, we have some similarities: both raised in English-speaking countries, we speak Gujarati with an accent and wear jeans and T-shirts a good deal of the time. These traits alone separate us from many of our relatives.

Migration song is not only the melody line of the ones who leave; it is also the deep blue undertones of those who, unwilling, remain. The story of the not-diaspora, the ones we leave behind and who watch our accumulations with a mixture of envy and rage, is ever present, whether we choose to see it or not. And so the homeland is, perhaps, where we

The moment of migration is not singular, of course, but part of the string of moments, as the universe is composed (it seems now) of strings, each looped to the next in inextricable continuity. Rupture the strings, and you create a black hole. A journey is only a place to start the story; the human story. And we migrants are not merely curiosities

In the 1980s, when my father's Apple IIe computer was brand-new and his hope that his children would marry within the caste was intact, he compiled a directory of the Khatris of North America. The families numbered a couple of hundred, and most cooperated by providing complete listings, including their children's birth dates—which everyone knew was