Generations
This Is About Smoking
I’m coming apart like the first cigarette I ever rolled. Loose, slobbering, and burning too fast.
Three Car Crashes and the Long Afterward
The story is no longer me and my vehicles but my mother and hers. We called it an accident, but it wasn’t.
For My Father, Every Time Is Wartime
A part of me, the part trained to put my father first, thought I should allow him into my home, regardless of his threats.
After My Mother Passed, My Father’s Consistency in Religion Was an Anchor
A new period in my life started when Abu could no longer fast for Ramadan.
The Summer I Became a Thief
Sometimes I thought of it as war reparations. On the outwardly civil but quietly vicious battlefield of my parents’ divorce, I had been the clear loser.
The Rhythms We Keep Since My Mother’s Stroke
The slight din of the television on TVLand from her room made its way toward the kitchen where Curtis and I sat, trying to figure out how this was all going to go. How everything had changed.
The Partition Museum Reminded Me That India’s History Is Also My Family’s History
Before I visited the Partition Museum, I had a sense that all the years of self-erasure could be undone if I just heard, watched, read enough. Now I’m beginning to rethink that strategy.
The Mother I Choose to Remember Is the Mother Who Didn’t Want to Lose Me
“I realized I had to change or I was going to lose you,” my mother told me. “So I did.”
With His Absence, My Artist Father Taught Me the Art of Vanishing
My father was missing. How could I put him back in the picture?