To avoid this sort of review in the future, I suppose I could decide to play it safe and never write about India or non-immigrant 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. Rendering an Indian landscape into English, with or without sinks, is one thing.
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. It is something of a betrayal, for example, to have the family in When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine speaking English when they are at home. For in my imagination, these characters are conversing in Bengali.