To get to the Desert Rain coffee-house in central Leh, you have to walk off the crowded main street that leads to the mosque and slither through a passageway to a parallel back lane, barely paved, too narrow for more than three people to pass at a time, in the process forever of being completed, […]

So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi. Relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”); workers from villages and rainfalls of marigolds; cousins that no one can quite place and […]

I was staying in India earlier this year, and every time I returned to my room in a semi-luxury hotel, one of the chambermen along the corridor smiled at me sweetly and said, “Sir, sir, I can clean your room?” He had cleaned it only about an hour before, usually, and there was only so […]

Rohinton Mistry writes what could be called Neo-Realist novels, in honor of the simple, rending tales of struggle and affliction that distinguished the Italian films of the early Fifties (and continue to this day in, say, the films coming out of Iran). Though Mistry has lived in Toronto since 1975, when he emigrated at the […]

If writing were a religion, V.S. Naipaul would be its most steadfast monk. Arriving in Oxford in 1950, as an 18 year-old scholarship boy from Trinidad, he already looked old beyond his years, haunted by an outsider’s uncertainties and yet determined to make his way in the world. After his father died three years later, […]