And yet, given the fact that I was raised in the U.S., the review also implies that I cannot know better. To avoid this sort of review in the future, I suppose I could decide to play it safe and never write about India or nonimmigrant Indians again. I am the first person to admit that my knowledge of India is limited, the way in which all translations are. Still, my translation of India has evoked, for some readers and reviewers here and there, the illusion of cultural accuracy, and resonance. One of my mother's cousins, now living in West Virginia, even went so far as to thank me for taking her back to the Calcutta of her childhood, all its requisite details, in her opinion, intact.
Dialogue is wholly another.
Because Bengali is essentially a spoken language for me, because it occupies such an aural presence in my mind, forcing my Bengali characters to speak a tongue they either can't or wouldn't speak in a given scene is one of my most daunting challenges. It is a disorienting and at times highly dissatisfying thing to do. I must abandon a certain sense of verisimilitude in the process, a certain fidelity. For in my imagination, these characters are conversing in Bengali. Such tactics aren't feasible for a general audience, except in very short doses.