Of the dozens of laws aimed at Indians decorating the legal gazettes of the South African colonies, perhaps the most urgently debated and carefully crafted were the ones on immigration. Although Ganda's uncles had entered South Africa freely, by the time he made his own journey in 1905, the net had tightened.

two blond girls, tall, advance on a seated brown girl; two brown children ride away fast on their bicycles. These flashes bear a certain kinship to the memories of survivors of trauma, and share the basic confusion. Distress, fear, violence without a known cause turns inward, and grows. Without language, a child believes it is all her own fault.

Our subdivision's development was linked to a massive demographic shift that had begun before World War II. As African Americans migrated up from the South for jobs in northern cities, whites abandoned those cities. They paved over more and more of the plains, inventing suburban sprawl to satisfy a need—not simply for land, but for white land. In

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.

the brain drain. Coined in 1962 to describe the large-scale migration of skilled technocrats from Britain to the United States, the term was quickly co-opted to describe a related, even more dramatic phenomenon: the movement of educated professionals from developing countries, particularly India and China, to developed nations, particularly the

"The whole subject is perhaps the most difficult we have had to deal with," fretted an internal London bureaucratic memo, 1897. "The Colonies wish to exclude the Indians from spreading themselves all over the Empire. If we agree, we are liable to forfeit the loyalty of the Indians. If we do not agree we forfeit the loyalty of the Colonists."

While a Hindu man's life is traditionally divided into four stages, each representing a stage of his spiritual growth, a Hindu woman's is divided into only three. Daughter, wife, widow: each is a relative status, a reference to her role vis-à-vis male kin. And of the three, by far the most important, the one that all of history seems devoted to

He settled on salt. "History has no instance of a tax as cruel as the salt tax," Gandhi declared; through it, "the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless." The issue was not only taxation, though the tax was heavy, working out by his account to 2,400 percent over the sale price. Indians were also

Jabri is a complicated word, one of the rare Gujarati terms whose meaning is unambiguously negative. Its possible meanings include shrewish, naughty, wicked, difficult. Once in a while it can be pronounced with a kind of grudging admiration, or admitted to be necessary, as in "Sometimes you've got to be jabri with these people." The Modern Combined