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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It’s a question of time, not motive.

Bharati Mukherjee

Related Topics

MotiveTime

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  What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

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  [On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.

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  I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

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  My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it’s just continuous overload.

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  In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter.

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  I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money.

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  Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

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  My first novel, ‘The Tiger’s Daughter,’ embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man’s land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.

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  I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.

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  The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

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  There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn’t regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn’t conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

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  I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship.

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  You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted… I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded.

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  Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

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  I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta:

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  Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.

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