Gopal Balachandran at the New England Review:
I recall, during the eighties, family members of mine whispering about the Indian kid in Pennsylvania convicted of murder, the Indian community being small, and the Tamil Brahmin community, to which Subu and I both belong, even smaller. Subu was the kid who’d gone down the wrong path, mixing with the wrong crowd, making for the most powerful cautionary tale of them all. Subu’s father was an academic, a physics professor and materials scientist at Penn State, who would have blended seamlessly with my parents’ friends in North Carolina, who were all vegetarian and spoke Brahminical Tamil with its idiosyncratic conjugations and vocabulary. Mrs. Vedam, as she was known in the community, always wore a sari, a thick bindi, and a thali wrapped around her neck, just like my mother. Subu, just like me, was invested with the sacred thread. Their faded color photos from the seventies and eighties could have graced any number of our peeling albums. But it was also easy to set it aside—central Pennsylvania was a world away from North Carolina. And who wanted to believe that life in middle-class suburbs, as uneven as it sometimes was for educated immigrants, could be taken away so abruptly and so easily? We all knew it could. From the hard experience of life in India, my parents knew that pure chance often led to ruin. They passed that kernel, epigenetically, to me. No wonder my nightmares of being in jail, cause unknown, started in childhood.
more here.
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