They say when two people are angry, they yell at each other. It’s unusually loud and jarring — Almost a screeching sound irritating to the ears. I never understood why two people shout and yell at each other when they are angry. I couldn’t do it myself. It felt out…

Dean Hewitt is sitting in a corner banquette in the back room of a dimly lit Italian restaurant that sits on the second floor of the Four Seasons hotel. As I follow the maître’d past tables covered with stiff white cloths, I hear his laugh rise above the dull clatter…

At 7.32 on a frigid Monday night in January, the house phone rang. It was 2013 but they still had a landline. Meg had gone to the neighbor’s house to play hopscotch. Liz, the high school senior had made her ritual retreat upstairs to her room. Bev had just opened…

Hey! Hey, come here!” Martin’s head popped above my desktop as I was working, and at the same time Karen’s hand reached out to shake my shoulder. I was slumped in the chair, working away at something in a post mid-day snack stupor. …

It’s been six and a half weeks since Hetali’s death, and Maya has talked me into going with her to Lonavala. The Deccan Queen, a train that plies between Bombay and Pune can have me back in under three hours, she reasons, and it seems Hetali’s parents have both stabilized…

Late one morning, on the way to work at Mission Street in downtown San Francisco, I spotted a middle-aged man in the light-rail station wearing one of the octopus-cat hoodies. He was sitting upright on a piece of cardboard, a soggy paper cup beside him, and was not wearing shoes…

“In English, the term memoir comes directly from the French for memory, mémoire, and yet more deeply rooted in the word memoir…is the ancient Greek, mermeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian memara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mermer, ‘to…

The years have mostly been kind to me. I have a decent job in Boston, a place to call home, a woman who literally saved my life, two beautiful kids, and a couple of decent people to that I can relate, acquaintances- I still have no one I call a…

One evening, many years later, as I revisit my old apartment in Andheri, a place where I grew up before I moved to the US, an old man approaches me outside my house as I’m about to lock the door. He looks at me with such warmth and love. Startled…