family | The Smart Set

Arranging Love

Usha Raj — 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

Balu George — 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

Elliott Eglash — 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!

Edward Comstock — 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

Lev Raphael — 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

Gemma Singh — 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

JR Lamm — 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

Olga Kovalenko — 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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Baby Bathwater

Wm. Anthony Connolly — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 14:22:15 +0000

I am typing this manuscript on a 1941 Royal Quiet De Luxe manual typewriter, which was manufactured during the early days of World War II. It’s one of 30 manual typewriters I own because, well, because why only have one when you can have 30? Up until just a few days ago, I had 35 […]

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Beyond the Quilt

Carolyn Davis — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 11:30:00 +0000

I have a quilt. A piece of an old dress, a worn-out pair of pants, an apron that has outlived its usefulness, and maybe even a head rag, once drenched in the sweat of our ancestors, all pieced together to make what is called the Cathedral Window. This quilt personifies its creator, Ms. Ruth. Born […]

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