Knowing that the conference wouldn't start until 4:00 the next day, I decided to check out the historic district of Philadelphia in the morning. Notorious for getting lost in new places, I did not venture out far. I visited the cracked Liberty Bell, took pictures of the other museums and bought souvenirs. Come lunchtime, I opted for a cheese hoagie, a Pennsylvania specialty.

The conference started promptly on time amid hi's and hellos as e mail correspondents finally developed into tangible faces and renowned scholars transformed into colleagues. What I look forward to in conferences is catching up with old friends. Sitting together with Ruvani Ranasinha and Deepti Misri, hearing them recount some gossip about ideological conflicts between Gayatri Spivak, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan and Ellke Boehmer, I was reminded of Monmoy whom I had bumped into at Hyderabad in 2004 and knew that he was working under Rajan's supervision at Oxford. Did anyone know Monmoy? I asked. They did, he's still at Oxford. Say hi to him from me. Ruvani knows Walter Pereira, an old friend of mine from Sri Lanka. Say hi to him for me, Ruvani says to me. MLA is also the place where I meet up with my graduate supervisor from my old grad school. Professor Hughes had been a rock of support for me and I cherish these meetings.

One of the best points of this meet was meeting Uma Parameswaran, a writer whom I have admired for long. Soft spoken and silver-haired, her demeanor belies the energy that is apparent in her poems and stories. That night at "Hamara Mushaira" she read from her poems and a part from her novella where an abused wife walks out of her in-law's house only to return to retrieve her mother's gift, all armed with a plastic baseball bat. On her way back she befriends a young boy on the bus who promises to teach her Canadian street language that would go well with her new found persona. The boy, however, adds, "I would get rid of the bat though, if I were you."

Hena Ahmad, the current president of SALA (South Asian Literary Association) and Nyla Ali Khan, one of the co-chairs, gave their welcome speeches. Nyla was in a nubbly purple turtle neck sweater, unlike the rest of us very formally attired listeners. Lost luggage, she explained, pointing to her unprofessorial garb. Ah, we nodded. Of the first day's sessions, I especially chose to attend one that overlapped themes with my own paper. This was on Nationalism, Religious Fundamentalism, and Transnationalism in the Global Arena. University of London's Bidhan Roy's paper was on Islamicist identity among contemporary British South Asian novels. Questioning as to why an increasing number of British Muslims are adopting an increasingly radicalized version of Islamicist identities, Roy suggested that such as identity was a retreat from the dual aspects of global homogenization and the fragmentation of stable collective identities. Roy, however, delves further to indicate an alternative understanding of Islamicist identities that views them, not as counter positioned to the process of globalization, but rather enabled by it. Islamicist identities, from this perspective, are seen as an attempt to radically destabilize the universalization of Western values by rejecting politically, and epistemologicaly, the logic of secular liberalism. Related to this one was Ruvani's paper: "Re-framing British Muslims." Both discussed Monica Ali's Brick Lane, as I was to do the next day.

A bane of conferences is that one can't be at two sessions at a time. The next day, I wanted to be at my friend Chandrima Chakraborty's talk. She was to speak about the film Water and the Eurocentric Orientalizing of the movie. But then, there was a session called "Writer's Panel: Interrogating Diasporic Authorship." I had befriended the speakers earlier and the panel promised to be an interesting one. It definitely was. Mary Anne Mohanraj, the executive director of DesiLit, used her own embodiment of Sri Lankan, Tamil, American and multi-sexual identities to problematise how her own work is interpreted. By the time I recovered from the daze of Mary's multiple personalities, Purvi Shah started to speak. Besides being a poet, Purvi is also the executive director of Sakhi for South Asian Women. Purvi's talk was called "Diasporic Intertextuality: When the Whole is more than the Sum of Its parts." Her theme was immigration and the loss that comes in its wake. What I found interesting is how her work transcends disciplines. She read out poems from her collection Terrain Tracks, showing how the diasporic community allows for a conversation among artists who work in different media and come from different ethnic backgrounds. As a companion piece to her poem was a collage made up of photos, flowers and knick-knacks which, she told us, were printed directly placed on a scanner. The collage artist, Fariba S. Alam, is a Bangladeshi-American, said her aim was to explore the idea of 'third spaces,' such as the ones that exist between "abused and empowered, exotic and local, represented and underexposed."

Next, Ronita Bhattacharya's paper exposed the frustration that we, South Asians academics, who read and teach the "Cosmopolitan Celebrity" authors regularly experience. Ronita analyzed Bharati Mukherjee's use of Indian cultural artifacts and the distortion of their authenticity by a mile or more. For example, in her use of the movie Mister India, Mukherjee mixes up the time frame as well as the actor, when the movie itself was a mega hit in India itself. Of course, the North American readers would be none the wiser about these, but any first generation South Asian would be perplexed, not to say annoyed, to be taken to be such dupes. And let's not forget the preponderance of paisleys whenever someone is wearing a sari, Ronita reminded us. And this is not just with Mukherjee, Ronita also implicated Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni as writers who she felt render the South Asian readers invisible in their narratives. The next speaker was a chemistry teacher turned poet, but I had to run, the next session was mine.

In the evening, the very last session came, the ninth for that day. I had to sneak out after the second speaker. I just could not listen to one more paper. Call it information overload. I joined the other escapees having tea outside the closed doors of the simultaneous sessions. The final parts were the keynote speech and the presentation of the SALA Award to be followed by the round table: "Postcolonialism and South Asian Diaspora." Nyla asked me to be part of the final discussion session. Much as I was tempted, I could not. I had a train to board and an old friend to catch up with in New York.

Rebecca Sultana teaches at Concordia University, Canada.