The Museum of Failures

by Thrity Umrigar

He had the awful sense that years from now, when he lay awake in the accusatory dark, this memory would be tucked into his heart like those folded notes Shirin used to send with his school lunches: he was the man who had failed to recognize his own mother.

that despite being allowed to take a sizable bite out of the American dream, he would never completely belong to America. To any country, really. This was the eternal burden of the immigrant, the divided soul.

In India, they understood the inherent messiness of life, the endless bleeding of one story into another, from one generation to the next.

Contentment, the enemy of art.

was all here on Earth: The stars and the gutter, paradise and inferno. All the contradictions of the world embodied in every single human