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.