Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My kids are just waiting for me at home. I'm their father. They're wondering, 'When's Daddy coming home?'
My Struggles is a record close to me. It's about what I went through at home living with an abusive father.
I was a shy, awkward sort of a boy and my father's frequent absences from home, along with my hero worship for him, made me even shyer.
There is a chapter in 'Gentle Regrets' called 'Coming Home' which is really me expressing my later admiration for my father's public spirit.
I grew up in a broken home, working class. My paternal grandmother raised me and my brother; my father was with us, and my mother lived in Jersey.
One night, my father woke me up because he'd come home with a horse. Two days later, I asked my mother where it was, and she said it had run away. She'd sold it.
Everyone knows these stories about a wild and crazy guy called Bonzo, but at home he was just like any other father; always hollering at me for not doing my homework.
My father, Fukujuro, drove a cab and my mother, Itsuko, was a homemaker. My parents often took me to see Impressionist exhibits. At home, I would paint pictures in a similar style.
My parents sacrificed everything for me. My father worked on a building site and as a driver - so many jobs. My mum was at home full-time to take care of me, my sister, and two brothers.
I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.
My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.
When I left my home to become an actress, my father didn't give me a single penny. I struggled a lot, and they had no idea what I went through. My grandfather even asked me to drop my surname when he learnt I was joining films.
I remember unbelievable tension in our home. There were lots of meetings, lots of worries. I remember my father told me I had to be careful of what I said on the phone because it was tapped. And I remember how his friends adored and revered him.
My father came from an intellectual and studious avenue as opposed to a brawler's avenue. So I had to go further afield and I brought all kinds of unscrupulous oiks back home - earless, toothless vagabonds - to teach me the arts of the old bagarre.
When I was seven, I had to stay home for several weeks because of some ailment, whereupon my father elected to teach me so that I should not fall behind. In fact, he taught me in three months as much as the school taught in two years, so, on returning to school, I was shifted from grade 4 to grade 6.
I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.
I can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one. Then I guess I stayed home a few extra days from school to read.
I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.