Bharati’s rejection of the hyphen (Asian-American) was not a rejection of her roots. In one of her last books Mukherjee’s heroine Tara turns on the lights in her San Francisco home at dusk because her grandmother in India once told her the spirits come out at that time. Mukherjee told me she did the same.
Bharati Mukherjee is gone but she left the light on for many of us.