What My Tibetan Grandmother Taught Me About Lasting Love (Catapult)
My grandmother planned never to marry. I first heard this in my twenties, when I stayed with her in Darjeeling after graduating from college. I wondered if, like me, she didn’t trust marriage. Having seen my parents and most of my friends’ parents divorce, I’d made a pact with myself: I would never marry; I’d live alone with a dog by the sea and write…
The Open World (Shenandoah)
The long summer twilight filters through the leaves of the birch trees in the front yard, throws lacy patterns on the yellow walls of the bedroom. In a jar next to my bed, the fireflies my brother and I caught earlier in the evening crawl up and down the glass, their light gradually fading. The dormer window, an eye onto the open world, frames swallows winging past. Through the wall, I hear my mother crying, my father’s low tones…
Aftershocks (Scholastic SCOPE)
An earthquake ripped apart her country. Now it’s ripping apart her family.
OLD ROSA by Reinaldo Arenas (Grove Press)
In the end she went out to the yard, almost enveloped in flames, leaned against the tamarind tree that no longer flowered, and began to cry in such a way that the tears seemed never to have begun, but to have been there always, flooding her eyes, producing that creaking noise, like the noise of the house at the moment when the flames made the strongest posts totter and the flashing frame came down in an enormous crackling that pierced the night like a volley of fireworks…
Mountains, Monasteries, and Myths: What I Discovered While Living in My Darjeeling Family Home (Catapult)
On a chilly Darjeeling morning, I sit in my grandmother’s living room. Billowy clouds sail past the 28,000-foot-high peaks of Mount Kanchenjunga, fifty miles distant as the crow flies. Sunlight spills through the lacy curtains, illuminating the thangka scroll paintings of the Buddha’s life that hang on the wooden walls.