Thus, Gurcharan

In a memoir full of wit and grace, Gurcharan Das relives his life, and finds new meanings that define him extraordinary

- NAVIN J. ANTONY

Gurcharan Das was just a boy when his family first arrived in America. Eisenhower was in the White House, and race politics was on the boil. Das felt the heat soon after he enrolled in a school in Washington, DC. A white girl invited him to her birthday party, where after a grand meal, the children played Spin the Bottle. The game involved a player spinning the bottle, and when it stopped, kissing the person of the opposite sex that the bottle was pointing to. An unwritten rule: black boys kissed only black girls, and white boys kissed only white girls.

So there was much confusion when it was Das’s turn. “I solved the problem brilliantly—I kissed everybody,” Das tells THE WEEK. “If there was a black girl on the other side, I would kiss her. If it was a white girl, I would kiss her. And I kept getting bonus points as a result of that. I just kept on kissing.”