Q. Please tell us about your Indian background.
A. I was born in Bangalore in 1954. My father came to America to get a PhD in Physical Chemistry when I was five years old. He spent four years doing that and returned to India. But he had received a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Research Council in Canada and so we all moved there. After two years, we moved to Columbus, Ohio. My mother kept an Indian household. So, the connection to India was remote (as going back to India  was prohibitively expensive) and came in the form of an aerogram. I didn’t return to India again until 1966 and then, I didn’t return until 1990. I went back a few times to Bangalore because I wanted to show India to my son. The culture is so powerful that I carried it around with me.
What remains of India is the moral habit of mind, the nature of Indian morality. Of course, I grew up on South Indian vegetarian cooking. I know how to cook the typical South Indian stuff — idlis, dosas, all kinds of kuttus, the sambars and rasams. I can also make certain fancy things such as gulab jamun from scratch.

Q. Did your Indian background influence your poetry?
A. I think it does. When I published my first book, there were lots of young Indian professionals who associated with it. I read with Shashi Tharoor while he was at the UN, and a novelist. We had a question-and-answer session where a young woman declared, “There doesn’t seem to be anything about India in your writing”. I told her, ‘Well, India, in my writing, is like god in Pascal’s universe.’ It is omnipresent but nowhere apparent. It’s an invisible force in my poems.