Garbaa, the word for the Gujarati folk dance, comes from a Sanskrit root, grb, for womb. Round and round we twirl to celebrate Navratri, the lunar festival of nine nights of dancing in honor of the goddess.

Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma's grandson, was sixteen years old, born and raised in Durban; he witnessed police "rounding up the African gangs only to let them off at a quieter spot to loot, kill and pillage. Policemen and gangs of white youth also robbed the Indian shops of what they could get after the rioters had broken the windows."

In the psychology of diaspora many pathologies have been defined: disorientation, alienation, difficulty in assimilating.

And yet, to migrate away from a community of migrants is to experience a particular kind of disorientation, a dual displacement. To free oneself from a family already in free-float means taking in a heady rush of air, the illusion of being an individual. One forgets the original nature of the longing, deep-rooted, almost atavistic, for clan, tribe,

A man who has always used knife, fork, and spoon may look at one who eats with his hands as more casual, lacking in etiquette, perhaps even primitive. But eating with one's hands carries its own complex rules, which any Indian village child comes to know. A Hindu eats, for example, only with the right hand, never the left—which is reserved for bath

In truth, when I fled Michigan I was not escaping racism, of which I had no conscious understanding; I was, like any American adolescent, escaping my parents. And I was escaping India, that part of it which lived in our skins, in our home.

Our parents also wanted to "preserve our culture," as if culture were a mango to be pickled in chili and brine, not a thing that evolves with its environment.

In a time of great change, such as the past century has seen, each life also contains a moment that comes to stand for the transition from the old world to the new. I have looked for this moment of migration in every life, and in my own, until I begin to believe I can see them all, shimmering, a string of lit buoys in the dark sea of history—each l

The fight dated back to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court had said that separate white and black schools could never be equal. But the ruling alone did not integrate America's schools. With the law on their side, civil rights activists had to wage a city-by-city legal battle against fierce, sometimes violent,