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"  &amp;quot;But I&amp;#039;m not her auntie.&amp;quot; Why she wrote the last line: That&amp;#039;s the last line of the most recently completed chapter of my first novel, Seen and Unseen Dangers. It&amp;#039;s about an Indian-American psychiatrist who thinks her family&amp;#039;s been cursed. At this point in the book (Chapter 11), the main character, Maya, who lives in New York, has traveled to India for a family wedding, bringing along her white best friend, Heidi. Heidi starts calling everyone Auntie and Uncle, the way she would if she were a younger member of an Indian family. Maya&amp;#039;s no-nonsense mom has the last word in the chapter, telling Maya, &amp;quot;Heidi&amp;#039;s such a nice girl. But I&amp;#039;m not her auntie.&amp;quot; Issues of belonging, or of feeling like an outsider, are a big theme in the book. They also crop up in a lot of the nonfiction I&amp;#039;ve written. Maybe I watched too much old-school Saturday Night Live as a child, but I love, love, love the term &amp;quot;honky,&amp;quot; offensive as it is. I often feel like a big, honking idiot, so I&amp;#039;ve appropriated it to describe myself all the time, especially when I&amp;#039;m not right on the inside of a community. When I lived in a small mountain village in Greece to research my travel memoir, North of Ithaka, I&amp;#039;d worry that I might wear the wrong thing to church or say something inappropriate at a festival, and, to calm myself down, I&amp;#039;d think, &amp;quot;Who cares if you do this wrong -- what do you know? You&amp;#039;re just a honky.&amp;quot; And this was the village my dad&amp;#039;s from -- so I wasn&amp;#039;t a total outsider, but I wasn&amp;#039;t one of the 50 people who were born there and still live there. In college, I once took a lit class which had a segment on &amp;quot;the poetry of Negritude,&amp;quot; an African-French literary movement inspired by the Harlem Renaissance. Thinking about my last line, I realize I seem to be dabbling in the prose of honkitude. I&amp;#039;m probably fascinated with issues of belonging or not belonging because my family moved from New York to Athens, Greece, when I was three, and I knew we weren&amp;#039;t like other families there (for one thing, we spoke English to each other). This was back in the late seventies/early eighties when Greece had just three state-run TV channels and the only American TV shows we ever got to see where Little House on the Prairie, Dance Fever, and Fantasy Island, quality programming which undoubtedly influences my work to this day. Then, when I was seven, we moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, and I was old enough to be aware that (a) life was nothing like Fantasy Island, and (b) my siblings and I weren&amp;#039;t like the kids around us who had dinner at six and knew not to tuck their T-shirts into their shorts during gym class. So I started observing people&amp;#039;s behavior and group dynamics early on -- in order to copy them, of course. Aside from working out my psychological hang-ups, this novel-in-progress has allowed me to take two trips to India and write them off on my taxes. That is the one good thing about being a writer, financially speaking -- the valid tax write-offs. On my last trip, I was in Benares on New Year&amp;#039;s Day, and as I walked to the shore of the sacred Ganges River, a clay statuette of Laksmi, goddess of wealth, washed up at my feet. She has yet to make me rich, but she looks great, so I brought her home, wrapped up in some Benarsi silk shawls. She is now sitting on my desk, surrounded by a Cycladic idol with a broken foot from the Cycladic Museum in Athens, a papier-m\u00E2ch\u00E9 lady skeleton working on a typewriter whom I bought during the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and a Buddha from Cambodia a friend gave me. Above the desk is a Mexican painting of a girl in a blue dress and a priapic orange bull floating over open books; the text in one of them says &amp;quot;Quiero apprender,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I want to learn,&amp;quot; so he&amp;#039;s a very intellectual bull, as well as being remarkably well-endowed.  The same morning Laksmi found me, a film crew stopped my Indian friend and me as we walked along one of the ghats on the river, and asked us to be extras in their movie. It&amp;#039;s a Tamil-language film, making it count as Kollywood instead of Bollywood, so if you speak Tamil, check out my film debut this December: Naan Kadavul. Maybe you&amp;#039;ll notice me walking past the camera in a crowd scene on the Ganges; I&amp;#039;m the honky.  About the author: Eleni Gage&amp;#039;s travel memoir, North of Ithaka, was published in 2005. She is a contributing editor to Blueprint magazine and a freelance writer. Her articles have appeared in Travel+Leisure, InStyle, Elle, The New York Times, Real Simple, The American Scholar, and many other publications. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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