If you grow up in a place, and you're small, even if the place is itself also small, it's huge to you. It's what's out there: it's the world outside of your door.
It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months.
Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.
Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.
Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.
She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, another to hear it from him.
She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.
She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at a time.
She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.
She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.
So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.
Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.
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