My essay “Urdu, My Love Song” appeared in Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally (2005) from Seal Press. The essay was many years in the making. I had been exploring themes of home, belonging, identity in poems, but in the end creative non-fiction was the only genre that let me fully explore my mixed feelings about my father’s Indian background, his exotic ‘otherness’ clashing with the homegrown southern culture we lived in.