She was an Indian-American growing up on a block in Bayside, Queens that resembled Sesame Street. Only instead of muppets, she had imaginary friends that kept her company while she played in the dark, cavernous basement of her family home. To the left of her house were the Ongs, who gifted her family a box
I was born in the former USSR, immigrating to San Francisco with my parents when I was seven. And although I spent the bulk of my growing up years in America, the fact was, having parents who were immigrants, speaking a different language at home, eating food no one had ever heard of (Cow tongue! Baked
The first new car my Dad ever purchased was a beige boat-on-wheels called a Pontiac Parisienne. You can see it in the background of countless family pictures: a gleaming metal grille and backend of Nicki Minaj-like proportions. It was an object of pride, a symbol of the new world we’d arrived in and our desire
On the morning of our third day in Kolkata, my wife and I woke to the pitiful cries of a dog and her puppies in the alley adjacent to my Aunt’s apartment. While animals are everywhere in the city, the sheer alienness of seeing cows dozing on sidewalks and goats bleating alongside beeping cars on
One of the strangest side-effects of growing up and leaving the world of my parents behind is that, after countless bar crawls and mornings feeling like the Cryptkeeper, I find myself missing the rigid frivolity of a Bengali party. There’s something masochistic about this. Few occasions are as deeply rooted in secret rules of engagement (and
