There were a lot of people there. Cool, distinguished, at the top of their cool, distinguished fields. I was very intimidated. My clothes were far too formal. I kept being introduced to people and nodding sagely as they spoke their names then forgetting what they’d said five seconds later. To douse my nerves, I drank a lot of Black Death, far too much as we stood around, and far too much as we sat at the dining table. It tasted delicious, so crisp and cold. It was like drinking the cold air beyond the window.

It turned out the Black Death was stronger than hell. It was so strong that after a while I began to hallucinate. The paintings on the wall were moving, I thought. Lava fields, in motion. A man, smiling. I was not only drunk but off my rocker. It was a really bad situation. There were a dozen people around me, maybe more, and now their facial expressions seemed antic. And possibly insincere. Were they acting? I was just trying to work this out when Alda Jónsdóttir slapped an enormous dish onto the center of the table. As she did this everyone exclaimed, “What a beautiful salmon!”

My father’s beliefs were so rigid that once, when my parents came to visit me at Barnard, I suggested we walk down Fifth Avenue to look at the shopwindows and he refused. He was almost viscerally offended by the idea of frivolously spending money, and of accumulating wealth. To this day, almost everything he’s earned goes back to impoverished relatives and charities in India. Also, waste was a crime. My father had witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, when the English starved Kolkata. Growing up, I’d be anxious about inviting my American friends to the house for my birthday parties, because my parents would always comment on all the unconsumed food they’d throw away. When I was a child, almost every purchase my parents made was deliberated over. We arrived in Kingston with a few suitcases, a couple of pots and pans. I don’t want to exaggerate, but there was a frugal, bare-bones quality to my upbringing, and a feeling that we were just passing through.

I’ve kept one for decades—it’s the font of all my writing. I recently taught a class on the diary at Barnard, where we read real ones by Pavese, Woolf, Sontag, André Gide, and Carolina Maria de Jesus, as well as work by Joyce, Ernaux, and others. These days people are more excited about digressive, almost unpresentable writing, the kind that exists in some private, intimate dimension, but for a long time, there was a sense of a literary hierarchy, with the novel at the top and any record of real-time experience, especially women’s experience, at the bottom—you know, “There she goes, pouring her heart out again.” That mode, which involves carving out a space in which no one is watching or listening, is how I’ve always operated. I remember that during an event for Interpreter of Maladies in London—this was before it won the Pulitzer, but it was a pretty big crowd—someone asked me, “Who do you write for?” And I stood on that stage, this incredibly green writer, and said, “I write for myself.” There was total silence.

Night has fallen by the time we reach the service station, and there’s a line for the pumps. It’s a Friday in the busy season, and amid the noise of car doors opening and closing, people talking and shouting, my parents do what they can to keep me from waking. Very slowly, Mom moves out from under me, lays me down on the back seat, and covers me with my yellow blanket.

She leans forward and whispers, “You want some coffee?”

My father turns and looks at her. He gazes at the hair falling long and loose over her chest. After this trip she will always wear it short, and she’ll stop sharing a bed with him, sleeping instead on a mattress on the floor of my room. My father is so tired that he is slow to answer.

“Coffee it is, then,” whispers Mom.

Finally, the day he had been so desperately waiting for arrived: October 25, 1995, a Wednesday. At precisely five o’clock, he walked into the Ecole’s packed lecture hall, where thousands of students were talking noisily in all kinds of languages—as though the children of the builders of the Tower of Babel had gathered there. Then came a sudden hush—Hazrat Derrida was about to appear. Puffing on his pipe, carrying a heavy bag, he made his way toward the desk in the middle of the stage. Derrida Sahib was wearing a great many layers, and as he approached the desk he began removing them one by one, hanging them on the back of the chair. He peeled off a raincoat, a jacket, a cardigan, a vest, a jersey, until his muscular torso was clothed in only a light sweater. The act seemed pregnant with meaning—a gesture toward the task before him, the layers of meaning that must be stripped away in the course of the seminar. Then Derrida took his seat, drew his papers from his bag, and lay them down. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “I assure you that what will be said over these weeks will be nothing other than the sum of the words of fictional people brought to life for a moment, and that their words will not bring us face-to-face with the possible. It is the impossible, instead, that we must confront. We will try to bring about something else, something ‘other,’ through an indefinable course that will be the source of our discussion—its goal—but that will forever remain outside its bounds. We will touch the impossible.”