PassportPhotos excerpt

From Passport Photos by Amitava Kumar  He looks up. He reads the immigrant's responses to his questions, the clothes, the accent. The officer's eyes return to the passport. He appears to be reading it more carefully. He frowns. Suddenly he turns around and tries to catch a colleague's eye. It is nothing, he wants more coffee. You notice all this if you are an immigrant. - - -     The officer reads the new arrival's place of birth. He has never heard of it. The immigrant has spent all of the thirty-one years of his life in that village. This difference in itself is quite ordinary. But for some reason that he does not understand, the immigrant is filled with shame. My attempt, as an immigrant writer, is to describe that shame is part of a historical process. 

© Amitava Kumar