“The poignant memoir of two brothers raised under the dark shadow of Indian Partition” before one becomes a Los Angeles cop and the other a terrorist (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
Sunil Dutta is a twenty-year veteran of the LAPD. He was also a biologist and a translator of classic Indian poetry. But before that, he was a refugee of the genocidal violence that followed the Partition of India. While Sunil eventually escaped to a new life, his brother Raju took a different path. Raju was arrested, fled the law, and became a fugitive. Then he became a terrorist.
Later in life, facing Stage IV lung cancer, Sunil tried to understand how he and his brother found themselves on such radically different paths. In Stealing Green Mangoes, Dutta takes us from his childhood home in Rajasthan to the streets of southeastern Los Angeles, attempting to uncover what it was that tore him and Raju apart.
A memoir with sweeping, spiritual ambitions, Stealing Green Mangoes asks probing questions about surviving trauma, crossing borders, and how we become who we are.
