Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

"This novel was born out of a combination of visits I paid to Kolkata and my own musings on family secrets . It struck me that that's an element that transcends culture and country -- the family secret…"

"Food is an important symbol. It’s particularly important for immigrants as the one thing they hope to be able to carry forward that’s relatively easy to recreate, although it was much harder in the ea…"

"I did not think I had a story to tell…Moving to a very different culture and learning to live on my own made me see the world much more clearly…. I thought about India more than I had ever before. I r…"

"When I wrote Arranged Marriage, many of the women in that book were isolated...That isn’t so for women coming here now. They have access to generations of wisdom, from recipes to how to bring up child…"

"I spent childhood vacations with my grandfather in a little village three hours outside of Kolkata. At night, he would bring me and my cousins together, light a kerosene lamp, because there was no ele…"

"It has definitely influenced my writing. I put appropriate Bengali words in among the English ones because I want that weaving of languages. Concepts from Bengali are sometimes difficult to translate …"

"…some characters would be more androgynous by nature and maybe by nurture. But as I’ve continued to write, I’ve made it a point, for my own growth, to write from the point of view of both men and wome…"