Through My Fiction, I Make Mainstream Readers

I Flew Into A Small Airport Surrounded By Cornfields And Pastures, Ready To Carry Out The Two Commands My Father Had Written Out For Me The Night Before I Left Calcutta: Spend Two Years Studying Creative Writing At The Iowa Writers Workshop, Then Come Back Home And Marry The Bridegroom He Selected For Me From Our Caste And Class.

Growing Up In An Old-fashioned Bengali Hindu Family And Going To A Convent School Run By Stern Irish Nuns, I Was Brought Up To Revere Rules. Without Rules, There Was Only Anarchy.

My First Novel, 'the Tiger's Daughter,' Embodies The Loneliness I Felt But Could Not Acknowledge, Even To Myself, As I Negotiated The No Man's Land Between The Country Of My Past And The Continent Of My Present.

I'm Very Moved By Chaos Theory, And That Sense Of Energy. That Quantum Physics. We Don't Really, In Hindu Tradition, Have A Father Figure Of A God. It's About Cosmic Energy, A Little Spark Of Which Is Inside Every Individual As The Soul.

But, Christ, There's A Difference Between Exotic And Foreign, Isn't There? Exotic Means You Know How To Use Your Foreignness, Or You Make Yourself A Little Foreign In Order To Appear Exotic. Real Foreign Is A Little Scary, Believe Me.