Oindrila Mukherjee grew up in India and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University. Her work has appeared in Salon, Kenyon Review Online, Colorado Review, The Oxford Anthology of Bengali Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She writes for the Indian magazine Scroll.in and is a contributing editor for the journal Aster(ix). She is in the process of editing a novel and a collection of stories. Her work in this issue is an excerpt from her novel.