Daniel Pandiyan

I came to the United States from India more than twenty years ago, and cultural differences have fascinated me ever since: the norms people grow up inside without noticing, the small unspoken rules of how strangers size each other up, and how differently the same behavior can be judged, acceptable in one country, unthinkable in another. I've spent my career as a technologist, degrees and multinationals and the usual ladder, though my reading has always run elsewhere, to world cultures, religions, philosophy, and art. I paint as an amateur and with real pleasure, and I spend as much time as I can outdoors, most of it on a bicycle. What I've done beyond that has been small and personal rather than organized: helping immigrant families where I could, and some local charities that work with young people. Sanctuary, my first novel, began with a reversal. If the lights went out everywhere, and an American child found himself on the wrong side of a border with the wrong papers, what would he learn about himself, the people around him, the country he calls home? The question came from people I knew, immigrants from Latin America who had made that very journey. Answering it took ninety-two days of a thirteen-year-old's life and three thousand miles of road. I live in Chicago.