In India, There Are Real Consequences To

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.

What Was The Duty Of The Teacher If Not To Inspire?

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.

I Had A 2-week Courtship With A Fellow Student In The Fiction Workshop In Iowa And A 5-minute Wedding In A Lawyer's Office Above The Coffee Shop Where We'd Been Having Lunch That Day. And So I Sent A Cable To My Father Saying, 'by The Time You Get This, Daddy, I'll Already Be Mrs. Blaise!'

In Hindu Societies, Especially Overprotected Patriarchal Families Like Mine, Daughters Are Not At All Desirable. They Are Trouble. And A Mother Who, As Mine Did, Has Three Daughters, No Sons, Is Supposed To Go And Hang Herself, Kill Herself, Because It Is Such An Unlucky Kind Of Motherhood To Have.