Stealing Green Mangoes: Two Brothers, Two Fates, One Indian Childhood

"Sir, what is your last name.... Do you belong to a street gang?" This isn't the typical way for a police officer to approach a man on a city street, but Sunil Dutta isn't a typical cop. He comes from academia with a Ph.D. in plant biology, a scientist who decides to join the Los Angeles Police Department because he hopes to help make it more "humane."

Although his background is scholarly, Dutta is from a country that was forced to split in two, born to parents who had fled into India from Pakistan. The world he grew up in was filled with violence and poverty, a place that he and his older brother Raju escaped through two dissimilar forms of luck.

Raju attracted a wealthy aristocrat who adopted him and provided him with a luxurious life--until the day he was disowned and cast aside. Dutta met an American girl and they became friends; they fell in love and married in the United States.

On these separate paths the two brothers' lives diverge, with one leading to dishonesty and murder, the other to happiness and success. "What could explain why our decisions and lives turned out to be so different?" is Dutta's prevailing question, which takes on greater urgency when his doctor presents him with a fatal diagnosis.

Author of several books and co-translator (with his father-in-law, Robert Bly) of poems by the Urdu poet Ghalib, Dutta brings a sharp and painful candor to a memoir that serves as his obituary. He died of cancer in 2019, soon after completing Stealing Green Mangoes. --Janet Brown, author and former bookseller

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