Stealing the Ambassador: A Novel [Paperback]

Stealing the Ambassador showcases an astonishing new talent that captures the clashing dynamics of family and cultures with a power that will remind readers of Zadie Smith'sWhite Teethand Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winningInterpreter of Maladies.
Twenty-three-year-old Rajiv Kothari is caught between two formidable men: a father who believed success and freedom could be found only in America and a grandfather who fought to guarantee such ideals in India, their homeland. As the stories of each generation unfold,Stealing the Ambassadorilluminates the interplay between the forces of history and family ties. A beautifully rendered depiction of the immigrant experience,Stealing the Ambassadoris also an unforgettable portrait of the tortured yet loving relationships between fathers and sons.Sameer Parekhwas born in Poughkeepsie, New York. He graduated from Brown University and was a 1996-1997 Fulbright Scholar in India. He is currently completing medical school and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.Chapter One

i.

In 1966 my father was born for a second time in this, his most recent life, baptized by a gentle and lazy January snowfall, flake after flake, a thousand perfect welcomes, he remembered aloud once, to a new country. When he woke the next day, snow covered the earth in swells and valleys of unbroken, unrelenting white, and my father thought, because he had, hours ago, been on a plane for the first time, if you could steal the clouds from the sky and spread them over the earth, neatly, evenly, this is what it would look like. To hear him tell it, before he'd ever seen a spring or summer or fall, he'd found a favorite season.

He mentioned his arrival to me once. I was eleven, sitting with my parents and my brother on folding chairs at the dinner table. Oh, I liked it, that is for certain. My father's English was accented, a thick and general auditory reminder that his passport had once beelsµ