Sublime

To be normal, American, normal.

Assimilation was our sole strategy, the totem we believed would protect us.

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

he was, as Gujaratis say, ghar-no maanas: a man from home, a kinsman. He could be trusted.

So they continued to bring in Indian workers, who continued to exercise their right to stay after their contracts expired; and they continued, reluctantly, to admit passenger Indians.

Entering its gates, he passed rows of beggars, and could not imagine hardening himself to the sight every day; was this the new India, or was it an India he had never noticed as a child?

To my father's people, America was uncharted territory—a country where few of their kind had ventured, where one might easily become, in the Gujarati idiom, lost. Poiro khowai jahe, the boy will become lost, busybodies warned his mother. "Lost" meant to become rootless, tailless; to forget the ways of the clan. It was equivalent to anothe

It was only when I began traveling among my relatives for this book that I came to understand how each life is a tangle of push and pull; how each migration opens up future directions; and how my own journey, which I had come to believe and been made to feel was so unusual as to be selfish and freakish, was in fact continuous with a long heritage o

In the white man's land one could be comfortable; one might seize opportunities and make one's way. But one would never feel quite at home.