Our Mothers, Ourselves

I intended to begin with a personal admission. “I didn’t like being pregnant,” I was going to write, before describing the bodily discomforts (hypersalivation!) and psychic stresses (due date during ...

Everyday India

Nikhil Suroshe is the child of small farmers in Yavatmal district, Maharashtra. He is fair-skinned, with a mop of brown hair and a regal nose, and in India, where skin is often read as an indicator ...

Complicity and Critique

In a posh Delhi neighborhood, in a walled estate with glass chandeliers and bathrooms of Italian marble, a 25-year-old heir to his family’s business and real estate fortune dreams of transforming the ...

Lahiri, High and Low

Before beginning graduate school, I promised myself that I would never write about Jhumpa Lahiri. I had studied Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake (2003), in a maddening undergraduate literature ...