I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.
American? Indian? I don't know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I'm asked where I am from. I'm from nowhere; I always was, but now I am happy knowing it.
My reasons for coming to get married in Calcutta are complicated, and it's very hard to put it into a sentence. People ask me why. To me, it just felt like a very natural and exciting decision.
At 6:30, which was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention.
They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'
I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.
Literature is such a profound and deep way to look into someone else's life, his mind, his hopes and thoughts. Books have opened so many doors for me, taking me to places where my normal life and its finite limits could never have.
I think one of the things that attracted me about theater and the stage was the ability to escape reality. And that is what I do in my work as a writer, but in a different way. And the freedom to put your own existence on ice and become another person.
If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day.
Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.
The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.
I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.
I feel that Italy's a country that's constantly looking out and constantly following what's happening in other cultural centers. What is being written in America, what is being published in England, what is being published in France. It's a culture that's always wanting to absorb and inform itself of other works, other writers, etc., etc.
A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.
When I write in Italian - this is just the metaphor that came to me immediately, and I really think this is what it is - I feel like I'm writing with my left hand. Because of that weakness, there is this enormous freedom that comes with it.
When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away.
Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.
Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
I think it's the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw meaning from, just personally.
I find it really liberating to be in a place where I am a foreigner in every way. I've lived with this all my life - this divide, this bifurcation. And in Italy, I don't feel it. There's none of that tension, only the expectation I place on myself to speak the language well. I find it relaxing. Something drops away, and I observe.
My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
I've always had this feeling wherever I go. Of not feeling fully part of things, not fully accepted, not fully inside of something.
It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.
My father encouraged me to work in the library, just because it was the world that he knew. But I also wanted to do it. I also wanted to work in the library and be part of the library somehow, because it represented a world that really wasn't represented in my home, and I wanted it to be.
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
I write to feel alone.
The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.
It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city.
I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things.
