For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling of… - Jhumpa Lahiri

Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

But it’s not just my eyes that suffer at dawn, it’s my heart that breaks. I feel the light that blazes across the city, striking my face but also warming my marrow, and as it rises I continue to look at my neighbors’ laundry, threadbare and bone-dry. Then I close my eyes so that I see the light through my eyelids, and I regret being typically sluggish and missing out on this extraordinary, everyday phenomenon

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that a cover is a sort of translation, that is, an interpretation of my words in another language — a visual one. It represents the text, but isn't part of it. It can't be too literal. It has to have its own take on the book.

Like a translation, a cover can be faithful to at the book, or it can be misleading. In theory, like a translation, it should be in the service of the book, but this dynamic isn't always the case.

What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.