 Thank you all for coming here. It's an honor to read in the British Library and to read with these wonderful writers. A friend of mine said that when he gives readings he tries to read only the funny bits. You know, that's such an imposition to read on and on to an audience. And so I am going to read to you only the funny bits from my book. When I was a child I thought my father had been assigned to us by the government. This was because he appeared to serve no purpose. When he got home in the evening all he did was sit in his chair in the living room, drink tea and read the paper. Often he looked angry. By the time we left for America I knew that the government had not sent him to live with us. Still I continued to think that he served no purpose. Children think in weird ways. I remember when I was a child, when I was 6 or 7, I thought, you know, I'm about as old as I need to be. The book is told from the point of view of a child and it was interesting to go back and to remember all the strange things that I had thought. I'll continue. As far back as I can remember my parents have bothered each other. In India we lived in two cement rooms on the roof of a house. The bathroom stood separate from the living quarters. The sink was attached to the outside of one of the walls. Each night my father would stand before the sink, the sky above him full of stars and brush his teeth till his gums bled. Then he would spit the blood into the sink and turn to my mother and say, death should be death, no matter what we do we will all die. Yes, yes, beat drums, my mother said once, tell the newspapers to make sure everyone knows this thing you have discovered. Like many people of her generation, those born before independence, my mother viewed gloom as unpatriotic. To complain was to show that one was not willing to accept difficulties, that one was not willing to do the hard work that was needed to build the country. My father was only two years older than my mother and like her he saw dishonesty and selfishness everywhere. Not only did he see this but he believed that everybody else did too and that they were deliberately not acknowledging what they saw. My mother's irritation at his spitting blood he interpreted as hypocrisy. So you know this book, Family Life, it took me twelve and a half years to write and I wrote seven thousand pages and the book is not long. It's two hundred and twenty five pages long so it's the equivalent of writing thirty books, truly a horror, just a horror writing this thing. Somebody asked me how did I begin to know that the book was actually finishing, it was coming to its end. And for me I knew the book was about done when certain qualities began to appear in the prose. So for me the most wonderful things in life, you know the greatest things in life are right next to idiocy. So when I began to see sentences such as each night my father would stand before the sink, the sky above him full of stars and brush his teeth till his gums bled. I felt oh okay thank God my voice is finally appearing in this book. The other thing is for me in the books that I write I'd like to make sure that all the characters are right and all the characters are wrong. So in this instance for me the mother is correct in that she, you know her point is what's the value of this sort of pointless gloom. You know what do we gain from that. But she is wrong in that her motivation for that position is what do other people think. You know she wants other people to think well of her. And the father is of course wrong in that he is cynical about everything. Except frankly if you know India it might make sense to be cynical about everything. So that sort of, that was one of the things, those were some of the qualities that I was looking for. When I was, this book doesn't have that much plot that is it doesn't have that much causation. A causes B, B causes C and then F wanders in right which is similar to how ordinary life occurs. You know when we look at our own life oftentimes certain things are caused and certain things just happen. And I wanted to mimic that. But to create a fiction where when you read it it feels like it feels compulsively readable. You have to keep giving the reader a feeling of satisfaction, a feeling of purpose. One way to do that is to write the story in sort of small sections. Because every, you know how when you finish a chapter you feel I have accomplished something. It's the same thing when you finish reading a section. So for example that section I just read is about this long. And when you get to the end there's a little feeling of okay I've accomplished something. And so you want to keep giving this reader this little boost. So that was part of the technique of writing this thing. The problem when you have these small sections is that when you begin the new section you almost have to have a new beginning. You need to hook your reader in again. So my mother's irritation at his spitting blood he interpreted as hypocrisy. Then a break and then you need to hook the reader again. For me the way that I tend to work is I tend to hook readers in through humor. My father was an accountant. He had wanted to emigrate to the west ever since he was in his early 20s. Ever since America liberalized its immigration policies in 1965. His wish was born out of self-loathing. Often when he walked down the street he would feel that the buildings he passed were indifferent to him. That he mattered so little to them that he might as well not have been born. Because he attributed this feeling to his circumstances and not to the fact that he was the sort of person who sent buildings having opinions of him. He believed that if he were somewhere else, especially somewhere where he earned in dollars and so was rich, he would be a different person and not feel the way he did. Another reason he wanted to emigrate was that he saw the west as glamorous with the excitement of science. In India in the 50s, 60s and 70s, radio and television's cars were not just expensive objects but were seen as almost supernatural for what they could do. I remember that when we turned on the radio in our apartment and the vacuum tubes warmed up. First the voices would sound far away and then they would rush at us. And this was thrilling as if the machine was making some special effort just for us. Of everybody in my family, my father loved science the most. The way he tried to bring it into his life was by going to medical clinics and having his urine tested. My father loved clinics and doctor's offices. Of course, hypochondria had something to do with this. My father felt that there was something wrong with him and perhaps it was something physical. Also, when he sat in the clinics and talked to doctors in lab coats, he felt that he was close to important things, that what the doctor was doing was the same as what a doctor would do in England or Germany or America, that he was already there in these foreign countries. My mother had no interest in emigrating for herself. She was a high school economics teacher and she liked her job. Yet my mother also thought that the west would provide me and my brother with opportunities. Then came the emergency. Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution for thousands of politicians and journalists in jail. My parents, like almost everyone who had seen independence come, were very patriotic. They were the sort of people who looked up at a cloud and thought, that's an Indian cloud. After the emergency, however, they began to think that even though they were ordinary and not likely to get into trouble with the government, it might still be better to emigrate. The book is written very closely. It's very similar to my own life. Before I began writing this thing, I asked my parents permission. I talked to my mother and my mother said, a kill, just make me look good. Then I talked to my father and my father doesn't read. Not only does he not read, he doesn't believe anybody else does either. He thinks that people are being pretentious and trying to show off by claiming to read. So I told him this thing and he said, a kill, if you want to keep a secret, put it in a book. I love my family and when you consider the sort of strange things they say, you think, how can you not love them? They're adorable. On a minor technical point, just because after having spent 12 and a half years writing it, I want all of you guys to admire the work I put in. When you're writing these sections without plot, you have to mimic some of the qualities of individual stories. Some of the things that a story requires is visual reality, physical reality. With each of the paragraphs in that section I read, first you have somebody walking down the street and you have houses. Then the second paragraph, you have a radio. Then you have in the third section some doctor's clinics. Each of these paragraphs evokes the various senses that we need for the reader to invest. I spent so long with this poor thing that I have to bother you guys with this. I'll continue. My father was waiting for us in the arrivals hall at the airport. He was leaning against a metal railing and looking irritated. I saw him and got anxious. The apartment my father had rented had one bedroom. It was in a tall brown brick building in Queens. The apartment's gray metal front door swung open into a foyer with a wooden floor. Beyond this was a living room with a reddish brown carpet that went from wall to wall. Other than in the movies, I had never seen a carpet. Bridgie and my parents walked across the foyer and into the living room. I went to the carpet's edge and stopped. A brass metal strip held the carpet to the floor. I took a step forward trying not to bring my weight down. I felt as if I was stepping onto a painting. My father took us to the bathroom to show us toilet paper and hot water. While my mother was interested in status, being better educated than others or being considered more proper, my father was simply interested in having more things. I think this was because while both of my parents had grown up poor, my father's childhood had been much more desperate. At some point my grandfather, my father's father, had begun to believe that thorns were growing out of his palms. He had taken a razor and picked at them till they were shaggy with scraps of skin. Because of my grandfather's problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did, people would look down on him. As a result, he cared less about convincing people of his merits and more about simply having things. The bathroom was narrow. It had a tub, sink and toilet in a row along one wall. My father reached between Bridgie and me and turned on the tap. Hot water came shaking and steaming from the tap. He stepped back and looked at us to gauge our reaction. I had never seen hot water coming from a tap before. In India during winter, my mother used to get up early to heat pots of water on the stove so we could bathe. Watching the hot water spilling as the water being hot were nothing as if there were an endless supply. I had the sense of being in a fairy tale. One of those stories with a jug that is always full of milk or bag that never empties of food. That night when I went to sleep on a mattress in the living room, even in my sleep I was aware that I was in America. During the coming days, the wealth of this new country kept astonishing me. The television had programming from morning till night. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on coloured paper. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached. Each time they did, I felt that we had been mistaken for somebody important. My father who had seemed pointless in India had brought us to America and now we were rich. The fact that he had achieved this made him appear different, mysterious. All the time now my father was saying things that revealed him as knowledgeable. Until we came to America, my mother had been the one who made all the decisions about Birju and me. Now I realise that my father too had opinions about raising us. This felt both surprising and intrusive, like being touched by relatives you don't know well. My father took Birju and me to a library. I had been in two libraries before then. One in a small noisy room next to a barber shop had had newspapers but not books and was used primarily by people searching employment ads. The other had been on the second floor of a temple and had had books but they were kept locked in glass-fronted cabinets. The library in Queens was bigger than either of the ones I had seen. It had several rooms and thousands of books. The librarian said that we could check out as many as we wanted. I did not believe this at first. My father told Birju and me that he would give us 50 cents for each book we read. This bribing struck me as un-Indian and wrong. My mother had told us that Americans were afraid of demanding things from their children. She said that this was because American parents did not care about their children and were unwilling to do the hard work of disciplining them. If my father wanted us to read, what he should do is threaten to beat us. I wondered whether my father might have become too American during the year that he had lived alone. I wondered, take out 10 picture books. My father said, you think I'm going to give you money for such small books? Along with getting Birju and me to read, the other thing my father wanted was for Birju to get into a school called the Bronx High School of Science where the son of a colleague had been accepted. My mother, Birju, and I had taken everything we could from the airplane. Red Air India blankets, pillows with paper pillowcases, headsets, sachets of ketchup, packets of salt and pepper, air sickness bags. Birju and I used the blankets until they frayed and tore. Around that time, we started going to school. This is what we used to do whenever we would get off the airplane. Whatever was not kneeled down came with us. I had a shy nature. You're a tiger at home, my mother said, and a cat outside. At school, I sat at the very back of the class in the row closest to the door. Often, I could not understand what my teacher was saying. I had studied English in India, but either my teacher spoke too quickly and used words I did not know, or else I was so afraid that her words sounded garbled in my ears. It was strange to be among so many whites. They all looked alike. When a boy came up to me between periods and asked a question, it would take me a moment to realize that I had spoken to him before. The school was three stories tall with hallways that looped on themselves and stairways connecting the floor like a giant game of snakes and ladders. Not only could I not tell white people apart, but I often got lost trying to find my classroom. Within a few months, I became so afraid of getting lost in the vastness of the school that I wouldn't leave the classroom when I had to use the toilet. We had lunch in an asphalt yard surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Wealed garbage cans were spread around the yard. I was often bullied. Sometimes a little boy would come up to me and tell me that I smelled bad. Then, if I said anything, a bigger boy would appear so suddenly that I could not tell where he had come from. He would knock me down. He'd stand over me, fist clenched in demand. You want to fight? You want to fight? Sometimes a boy surrounded me and shoved me back and forth, keeping me upright as a kind of game. Often standing in a corner of the asphalt yard, I would think, there has been a mistake. I'm not the sort of boy who's pushed around. I'm good at cricket. I'm good at marbles. I would have the strange feeling that I was occupying somebody else's life, that I had been given somebody else's destiny by mistake. I want to read one last paragraph because I find it delightful, and then I'll stop. For me, the two best things about America were television and the library. Every Saturday night, I watched The Love Boat. I looked at the women in their one-piece bathing suits and their high heels and imagined what it would be like when I was married. I decided that when I was married I would be very serious and my silence would lead to misunderstandings between me and my wife. We would have a fight and later make up and kiss. We would be wearing a white swimsuit as we kissed. Thank you very much.