How America Made Me into a Writer

This Independence Day I found myself thinking about my relationship with
America, and what I appreciate about living in this country. It struck me that
one of the most important changes in my life that came about as a result of my
immigration to America is that I became a writer. In India, growing up in a
traditional family, I had never considered being a writer. I did not think I
had the talent; more importantly, I did not think I had a story to tell. Moving
to a very different culture and learning to live on my own made me see the
world much more clearly.

In those pre-internet days--we did not
even have a T.V. in our home in Kolkata--I knew very little about life in the
United States. As a result, when I arrived in America, almost everything was
new to me. From shopping in grocery stores as large as warehouses, to seeing a
film on a gigantic drive-in movie theater, to the dangerously heady freedom of
purchasing items using my very first student charge card, it was all exciting
and sometimes bewildering. I appreciated the freedom and anonymity of being in
a city where only a handful of people knew who I was. I worked hard at menial,
minimum-wage jobs to put myself through college and learned for the first time
what dignity of labor meant.  I missed my family and their sheltering arms
so much that it was like having a hole in my heart. I thought about India more
than I had ever before. I realized what I appreciated about it--the warmth, the
closeness of extended family, the way spirituality pervades the culture. But I
also recognized problems about how women are often treated, and a rigid class
system because of which many doors are closed to all but the most fortunate and
most well-connected people.

EARLY DAYS IN CALIFORNIA

All around me I saw other immigrants (not necessarily only Indians) who were
undergoing similar experiences of culture-shock, who were carving out new
identities for themselves and trying to preserve the most valuable aspects of
their home cultures. I saw them trying to bring up children in a new
environment where the old parenting rules didn't quite work. I saw how, even as
they underwent a transformation, they too were transforming America. I read
their stories in the local papers, I overheard their conversations at Indian
parties, I imagined the things they didn't say and wove them together with my
own feelings and questions, and I fictionalized it all in stories that
ultimately became my very first collection, Arranged Marriage, and later,
novels such as The Mistress of Spices, Queen of Dreams, and Oleander Girl.

Sometimes I'm asked if I would have
become a writer if I hadn't moved to the United States. I don't know the answer
to that question. I do know, though, that I couldn't have written the same
kinds of stories, hybrids born out of the melding of the Indian and American
cultures.