Going the Right Way

When the daughter of two Indian immigrants moves from the US to India, she perplexes many people, and she inhabits a gap between the Indian residents who know their culture but want out, and those who want to connect with their roots.

Author: Kanan Gole
Source: The Smart Set
Published: Feb 15, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,825 words)

On the Great Silk Road

Wracked with survivor’s guilt after a tragic car accident, a young woman finds herself looking for meaning in Uzbekistan:

One of the few Peace Corps pamphlets I ever read came to my home in Arizona about three weeks before my departure to Uzbekistan. I don’t think I read all the way through, but it told me that I should only bring what I could carry, so I arrived in Philadelphia for a three-day staging event before I would leave the country for two years with relatively few belongings. “What You Should Know About Uzbekistan” said that Uzbekistan got very cold in the winter, it being one of two doubly landlocked countries, the other being Liechtenstein, causing the seasons to be very extreme, with winters often below freezing and summers exceeding 100 degrees. But the hot Arizona summer of 2003 made me regard the prospect of cold weather as a down-right lie: I didn’t bring boots, nor a hat nor a scarf. I didn’t even bring a pair of jeans because the pamphlet said that Uzbek women wore skirts for daily attire, and I wanted to be just like the Uzbeks. I did, however, bring a laptop computer to document bits and pieces of my life (which I didn’t use until I got over my fear of electrical surges about four months into my service). Besides that, I had one traveling backpack and one suitcase, half of which contained books, mostly poetry books: Dunn’s Between Angels, Alice Notley’s Waltzing Matilda, and the 5 pound, 2000 page Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

Source: The Smart Set
Published: Jul 2, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,626 words)

Splitting Hares

During the ’70s, a father persuades his daughter, a college-age feminist, to meet him at the Playboy Club:

“My conversation with my father been taking place on the hall phone in my dorm, Chapin Hall, which happened to be an all-women’s residence. Normally, the girls gave whoever was on the phone a lot of space, but with ‘Playboy Club’ and ‘Hugh Hefner’ springing out of the conversation like champagne corks, I attracted a crowd, a sort of Greek chorus in bathrobes and curlers. Jan, always a cut up, made bunny ears behind Jill. Linda, the biggest women’s libber on campus, raised the power salute. Karen and Nancy listened as they munched from a freshly popped bowl of popcorn. I was militant to begin with, but the more the women watched, the more emphatic my advocacy became.

“‘Dad,’ I tried to bargain, ‘why don’t you go to the Playboy Club with your friends, and I’ll meet you for dinner afterward.'”

Author: Lynn Levin
Source: The Smart Set
Published: Feb 20, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,856 words)