Leaving India: My Family's Journey From Five Villages To Five Continents - Plot & Excerpts
Body To assimilate means to give up not only your history but your body, to try to adopt an alien appearance because your own is not good enough, to fear naming yourself lest name be twisted into label... —Adrienne Rich DEEP IN THE MARROW of every story is a silence. Having struggled, all these pages, to be transparent, not to overwhelm the stories of others with my own, now it is my turn to emerge, solid. And I hardly know where to begin. I have practiced the art of submergence—invisibility, assimilation—all my life. To metamorphose, now, from neutral narrator to embodied character, self, seems a great act of exposure. Vulnerability, guilt, freedom, sympathy: Which thread shall I pull first? How shall I unravel or construct, from all of my memories and aches, one true pattern, one set of possibilities—one spine? I might have been named Gita, Saroj, or Sudha. I might have had trouble in school, been raised under the shadow of Mars, and brought good luck to my house. The telegram my father sent from San Francisco to Fiji at my birth was un-mystical: BABY GIRL BORN 742 PM MONDAY JULY 12TH STOP BHANU AND MINAL IN GOOD HEALTH LETTER FOLLOWS BHUPENDRA It was 1971.
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