Speller Trying to Cast a Spell?

An article about this Indian kid in Seattle Times. I read this article on Austin American Statesman on May 6, 2007.

Utah spelling whiz hopes win in bee can help bring parents back from India

GREEN RIVER, Utah — Great spellers come in all types, from egotistical showoffs to loners who find sanctuary in the forest of words. Kunal Sah, 13, an eighth-grader, is an angry speller. He lives with his uncle and aunt at the family-owned Ramada Limited Motel in Green River, a tough former railroad town in eastern Utah.

Sah is making himself into a great speller by way of unhappiness and the pressure he feels to reunite his family, which was ripped apart when his parents were sent back to India last year after being denied political asylum. He said he cried every day after his parents left. But as the spelling-bee season started and he began winning — becoming one of three students from Utah who will go to Washington, D.C, this month for the Scripps National Spelling Bee — he began to put his frustration into words.

Capturing the spotlight at the spelling bee, he said, could draw attention to his parents' case. The Indian news media have taken notice. An article in March in The Indian Express, an English-language daily newspaper, tried to capture the family's mix of pride and pain under the headline "Spelling bee whiz in U.S. motel room, parents in Bihar Village."

"What I want to do is win the nationals, and, if I do, then there is a chance that my mom and dad will have a better chance of coming back," Sah said, sitting on his bed. "The anger is pushing me," he said. "The anger is just telling me that yes, this year I have to win."

Green River played a role in the making of Sah the speller. He grew up in the town three hours southeast of Salt Lake City, after his family came in 1997 from California, where he was born a U.S. citizen. For the only boy of Indian heritage in a town of about 900 people, that might be lonely enough. But his parents, Kanhai and Sarita Sah, were strivers, bent on upward mobility, willing to work harder than the competition, staying open later, and trading up to a larger motel, the Ramada, after only five years.