family | The Smart Set

Loneliness, Love, Hope and the DeBarges

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000

I peeled a tangerine, left it on the side till its wrinkled orange skin, grew crisp and when it touched my lips it stuck there, like an envelope waiting to be sealed sending a message home, I bit down and the tracing paper crispness retreated to a wonderful onslaught of sweetness. I hope you will […]

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Revenge Condo

Mon, 20 May 2024 15:59:02 +0000

My friend Iskra sent me the condo real estate listing on the last morning of my trip to Turks and Caicos a few months ago. I awoke to her texts urging me to buy this and rent it out, and let’s be Golden Girls one day and that we’ll build a fireman’s pole connecting the […]

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Arranging Love

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Years after my mother had died, on a visit to my father in his childhood home in Nagercoil, India, where he had settled after his retirement, he told me he had always wanted to marry a Tamil girl from a prominent Christian family. Someone who had been selected by his beloved mother, someone who would […]

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The Last Emperor

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

The boy of 11 is at a book fair. School is out in Cochin, India, and he has dragged his father along to the book fair in the city. In two days’ time, the family is going on vacation to Ahmednagar, where his father’s elder brother stays. The uncle works in a sugar factory there, […]

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Putting My Foot In It

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

How to measure up to my mother’s kitchen? That wood-paneled heart of the house, where the fridge overflowed with vegetables and juices and nourishments of all sorts, and when she heard me open it, she’d tell me not to spoil my appetite.  Dinner was as close as we got to religion. Less the meal than […]

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Beach Trip!

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 13:14:04 +0000

Storms beat on the rocky cliffs and were echoed By icy-feathered terns and the eagle’s screams; No kinsman could offer comfort there, To a soul left drowning in desolation. The Seafarer (Old English Poem) Well before the Bible told the story of Jesus calming the storm in the Sea of Galilee, and even before Odysseus’ […]

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My Brother is Toast

Mon, 22 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I killed my brother. That was in my first novel, Winter Eyes, a story of Holocaust survivors hiding their horrific past from their son. I made that queer main character an only child. Boom — he was gone. If I could have erased my brother in real life, magically, or with a Marvel superhero power, I […]

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Hyphens, Buckles, Roots, and Wings

Mon, 01 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I lie down in bed with Mama, Papa, and Simba, the stuffed lion my brother gifted me when he returned home for the summer to our small, affluent, North Indian town. I love Papa’s bedtime stories, which take me on a journey through India’s fight for freedom against the British, the inventions of the Indus […]

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Smoke

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 12:30:00 +0000

“Honey, there’s been a fire . . . ” My mother’s quiet voice on the other end of the line delivered the news without a tremor. I stood in the middle of a concrete platform in downtown Tacoma, a city in Washington State I’d never intentionally visited. My family had always just driven past, breathing […]

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Growing Season

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Like many others in the UK, I started gardening during a COVID lockdown. I was a complete newbie back then, and even worse — a descendant of Ukrainian peasants, raised in a village on the most fertile land in Europe, I excelled not in growing, but killing plants. That spring in 2020, spurred by visions […]

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