I spent childhood vacations with my grandfather in a little village three hours outside of Kolkata. At night, he would bring me and my cousins togeth… - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Food is an important symbol. It’s particularly important for immigrants as the one thing they hope to be able to carry forward that’s relatively easy to recreate, although it was much harder in the early days when there weren’t many Indian groceries. Immigrants learned to make substitutions, like using Bisquick for gulab jamuns, tricks like that. I’m interested in food in my personal life, too. But food exists on many levels in my books. It reflects changes in our culture as we take shortcuts in how we cook our food, how it remains a comfort regardless.

This novel was born out of a combination of visits I paid to Kolkata and my own musings on family secrets (yes, my family has some!). It struck me that that's an element that transcends culture and country -- the family secret, things we consider shameful or dangerous and keep hidden from outsiders. And what a burden this can become. I was also musing on how the inability to live in amity with difference can cause so much strife and grief, both in the larger political arena and in the home. All these came together in Oleander Girl.

It has definitely influenced my writing. I put appropriate Bengali words in among the English ones because I want that weaving of languages. Concepts from Bengali are sometimes difficult to translate but I want them to have a role. It’s complicated. How do you bring them in without putting little explanatory notes? How do you write so you are at once inviting everyone into your book but also creating a special texture that people of your language background would especially appreciate?