“It is better to fail at the right thing than to succeed at the wrong one.”

“It is not sensible to think that way. We can only know the path we chose.”

“A monkey does not know the taste of ginger.” She grinned, proud of her translation. “Meaning what?” She thought about it more. “You cannot appreciate that which you do not know.”

For years, when things were so hard for Neel and me, I’d been resentful that they’d made this move thinking only of themselves and not about how it would affect us.

But love marriages are more fragile than arranged marriages. They can change in an instant.

Neel and I had not talked about our race and culture since those early years in Chicago when we were actively trying to assimilate. We knew what the end goal was, but we had never stopped to check in on each other about whether we felt we had reached it.

Those things happened every day and were a constant reminder that no matter how far I’d gone, I still had further to go.”

Now I realized the Dipti I saw around my parents wasn’t all of the person Neel married, and maybe their marriage wasn’t so far off from what I wanted as well.

Seeing the world through my lens for the past few days reignited something in me that had been dormant.