“Once in a while we burned a wok trying to make our churan, and Jima, Bhanu, or another matriarch would banish us from the kitchen. You shouldve told us, theyd say. We wouldve helped you. Youre not ...”

“Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the me...”

“I once asked her if she was happy. That depends on what I am able to get done today, she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had contr...”

“But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorces with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized ...”

“Its funny to me that most of the cooking in the world is done by women, and yet when you look at modern Western cuisine, its largely based on what a few dead Frenchmen have opined to be the correct...”

“The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentil...”

“Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that t...”

“As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families.”

“Families share relationships based not only blood, but also the unique affiliation of a terribly long cord when measured in comparison with any other undertaking in a persons life, from cradle to t...”

“work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.”

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”

“Children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people.”

“But marrying within one's own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty.”

“She took comfort in the familiarity of his smell, knowing that if she lost all her possessions and her home, at least she would have her family.”