Suketu Mehta

The great city biographer is tired of the Trumpian rhetoric around immigration and intervenes with a timely, relevant and necessary manifesto, finds Megha Majumdar

Suketu Mehta loves to cook. “All day long we writers work with our heads, sitting in front of a screen,” he says on a summer evening at a Manhattan bar. As the wide awnings shelter our sidewalk table from the rain, he continues, “So we need to work with our hands.” But meals are rarely simple pleasures. “Food has always been used against migrants,” he tells me. “I remember when I first got to my Catholic school in Queens, in 1977, my sisters and I never brought Indian food to the lunch room for fear of being mocked.” And this sort of cultural policing is one of many aspects of immigration Mehta writes about in his stellar new book of non-fiction, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. Author of the 2005 Pulitzer finalist Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found, Mehta—who was born in Kolkata and raised in Mumbai—has lived in USA for 42 years, 30 of them as a citizen.

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Mehta comes from a family of migrants. Decades ago, his grandfather left Gujarat for Kenya. Now, Mehta reflects, “We are dispersed all over the world, which is a good thing—we’ve done well. There are doctors, engineers and business people in the family.” He continues gently, “But sometimes I wonder how it would have been different if we had had the privilege of staying in one place, like Americans and Britons do. If we had been able to live in Kheda or Mahudha, where we come from, and if we still had all our family around us, our trees, our rivers, our language.”