Jhumpa Lahiri — American Author born on July 11, 1967,

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is an Indian Bengali American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake, was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna but goes by her nickname Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama. Her book The Lowland, published in 2013, was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. Lahiri is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University... (wikipedia)

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.
Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.
I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.
He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.