"What a gift it is to be with someone who knows the same stories, the same tastes, the same challenges of belonging and not belonging — as women, as Brown women, as Brown women called to parish ministry, with connections to Hinduism that the church is particularly anxious about and yet has helped us connect to family and also the divine."

The future doesn’t look great. But it’s also a little utopian: people rally together to create a different way of being community. They grow food, they build shelter, they make family, they establish ritual and connection to the Divine.

I loved the film “Monsoon Wedding”. When it came out on video, I rented it for my parents to watch. When the movie was over, they both said they enjoyed it, but my father was troubled by one plot line.

Back in India, some of my cousins’ children call me aunty. Actually, they call me mamima or kakima, depending on whether I’m their father’s cousin or their mother’s cousin.

We owe a lot to Yick Wo. By we, I mean Asians living in the United States, whether we’re citizens or not. And by Yick Wo, I mean the man who went to jail for running a laundromat in a wooden building.

“Your cousin Smriti told us that we were less like husband and wife and more like best friends when we stayed with her in Delhi,” my mother told me after my parents’ most recent visit to India. “That’s sweet!” I exclaimed, surprised at this sentimentality from my cousin.