My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.
I was a real mummy's girl - still am. And as for my father, well, I have an Oedipus complex I'm still working out. I love that man!
Lata Mangeshkar is an old friend. I knew her through my father Aparesh Lahiri who was a music director in Calcutta.
Everybody in our family studied a musical instrument. My father was really big on that. Somehow I only took a year or two of piano lessons and I convinced my father to let me take dancing lessons.
My father always wanted me to play a musical instrument, and I never had that type of skill.
And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
Both parents were very encouraging - especially my father. My father thought the sun rose and set with me. Neither one had a musical background or any musical talent. They liked classical music, but neither could carry a tune.
I like the Beatles. They're at the core of my musicality. And John Lennon's my spiritual father.
If you know the mother's genome and the father's genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.
My father joined the NAACP when he was 12, in the '50s. He was part of the organizing efforts that led to some of the first sit-ins in North Carolina.
We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too... When my father's brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather's name as surname. Wainaina.
At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, like my father, were reluctant to talk about their experiences.
In true, narcissistic fashion, when my father was diagnosed as a narcissist, he called us all up individually to tell us, and he did it with true pride.
My father's a fanatic for national parks, and every childhood trip was pretty much to national parks.
If I was a carpenter, and I was trying to maintain my father's musical legacy, then I guess it would be a burden because it wouldn't be natural to me to be dealing in music when my natural ability is in woodwork or whatever. But because my natural talent is also music, it kind of makes it much easier.
Becoming a father is the natural progression and the next stage after marriage. So the thought of becoming a father is itself an incredible feeling!
Because my father was often absent on naval duty, my mother suffered me to do much as I pleased.
My father worked in a grocery store. When the grocery chain went into administration, he eventually got a job in the naval dockyard in an office preparing the charts for the boats and the submarines before they headed out.
When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father's hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.
We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.
