At the time, were you aware of people being killed while at Abu Ghraib? One of them was the guy they called “The Iceman”.

Yeah, I heard about it. Actually, I was there the night the Iceman was killed. I went to Tier One and someone said this guy had been taken to the showers and they had the water running, and you could hear this guy just screaming bloody murder. It got to the point where it was so loud and unbearable that I went back to my room. And the next day when I came back there was this puddle of water outside the shower. And I asked, “What’s that from?” And they said, “Oh, its ice from keeping the body till they could transport him.” The Iceman was one of the “Ghost Detainees” that officially never existed.

Lynndie England is out of prison and has given her first interview to Stern. She asks how could Rumsfeld not have known what was happening at Abu Ghraib. She also says that there were “harsher pictures they had at the trial that the media decided not to expose.” The picture we get of her own life now, as a single mother of a child fathered by the man who was her co-accused and was condemned to ten years in prison, and who married England’s best friend at Abu Ghraib, another female soldier who was also among the accused, has all the hallmarks of a depressing trailerpark tragedy. England herself suffered no abuse as a prisoner. She says she was a celebrity in prison. The other inmates loved her. She says they were like “flies on shit.”

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“It never even dawned on me that people might look askance,” she says. “Anybody who knows me knows that I’m not some ivory-tower-working-two-days-a-week kind of person.”

Amitava Kumar, an English professor at Vassar College, is similarly frank. Every day he takes a short walk home from the campus, closes the blinds in his study, turns off the phone, switches on his white-noise machine (”I go for rain,” he says), and lies down on a futon for “a magical hour.”

“People joke a little bit about it,” he says. “Maybe it is the triumph of multiculturalism that people are usually forgiving. They think, ‘He’s Indian, it’s okay for him to nap.’”

The academic schedule is generally perfect for nappers, says Mr. Kumar, with one exception: job-candidate visits. “They fill every minute of these visits with some kind of meeting,” he says. “If you could put it as a public service in your article: Perhaps people who plan these itineraries, if they would allow some time to nap.”

From Jennifer Ruark’s piece “Spring Forward, Fall Back (and Take a Nap)” in the Chronicle.

Hat-tip: Jacki Musacchio, my former neighbor, who provided the said futon (not to mention the advice about the noise machine) before she left for greener pastures.

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The millions of people of Indian origin living in North America and Europe face a conundrum this holiday season: what to take, or send home, to relatives in India? Thanks to India’s increasingly open economy, no one there seems to want much from the West any more.

How things have changed. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, the protagonist’s mother precedes a visit home to India in the early 1970s with a shopping trip in Boston. She buys ‘’percale pillowcases, coloured candles, soaps on ropes'’. At a drugstore she purchases ‘’a Timex watch for her father-in-law, Bic pens for her cousins'’ - all items that were scarce or unavailable in India, or simply regarded as luxuries by people who had lived in a state-controlled economy since their independence from Britain in 1947.

Lahiri’s account rings true. Trips home have always been considered both a pleasure and a duty for Indians living abroad, and a central theme has been foreign largesse bestowed upon grateful family.

That era has now passed. Tunku Varadarajan in the Financial Times describes the change. Later in the piece, Suketu Mehta and I share our experiences with Tunku. Here’s Suketu: ‘’In the Seventies, our relatives marvelled at the bounty of America: toasters, razors, two-in-one radios, pens with digital clocks. On my trips back to India, I’d get lists of requests from family and friends, including, once, the bra and panty sizes for the daughter of our conservative Marwari neighbours - ‘preferably Marks & Spencer’.'’ Now it’s the Manhattan-based Mehta who has the extra empty suitcase when he travels to India. ‘’I buy jeans, watches and stoneware for my dinner table - all cheaper in India. And it’s my family in India that gets sent long lists before their trips to America. Revenge is sweet.'’

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