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

One of the worst slurs one can call a woman in Gujarati, a curse word akin to "cunt," is raan: widow. For a divorcee there is no word, the phenomenon being so uncommon that we must insert, on the rare occasions when a reference is necessary, and always in that special undertone of projected whisper that is reserved for shame, the English

By this time, approximately 1.2 million people of Indian origin were living outside the Indian subcontinent.

Is the grief I have felt, sometimes, in this writing, a kind of transmitted nostalgia—a mourning for what was lost, against the narrative of progress and accomplishment that characterizes most contemporary stories of our diaspora? I think sometimes of the villages where my ancestors lived, which I have visited for only a few days in my life. And I

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,

At the same time, certain provisions of the law were crafted to preserve America's white majority. Even as the act opened up immigration from Asia, for example, it tightened Latino immigration, which had been fairly free of restrictions. And with four of seven preference categories reserved for immediate relatives of American citizens, policymakers

How much of what we do at age fourteen or sixteen is a decision? And how much is a simpler drive for survival: an unspoken, interior understanding of what will help us to become ourselves, and the instinct to reach toward it—a tropism, like a plant that bends toward the sun?

To satisfy imperial politics, the legislators of Natal were forced into creativity. They could not, for example, limit Indian immigration; British subjects possessed the right to travel freely, and this right could not be taken away—at least, not on overtly racial grounds. So Natal imposed a "literacy" test. The immigration officer could

By the strange logic of the law's formula, Europe had more than 23,000 visas up for grabs and Africa more than 21,000, while Asia had just over 7,000 and Latin America fewer than 2,500.

The first lessons that the brain must process arrive through the body, and the heart. From birth or even before, pleasure is a need met, deeply satisfied; pain is deprivation. As infants, we know everything (taste of sustenance, comfort, love-hate) through the mother; then through the other bodies moving through our rooms, creating shifts of light,