Starred review from September 25, 2017
This vibrant memoir evokes the many paradoxes of Calcutta—it’s a place of food stalls and colonial mansions, as well as roaming cows and urine-stained streets. Choudhury’s family left Calcutta when he was 12 years old, and it wasn’t until after he graduated college in 2001 that he returned. Leaving behind his family in New Jersey moored to the “treacherous shoals of the lower middle class, a world of chronic car trouble and clothes from K-Mart,” Choudhury arrives in Calcutta with his wife to work at the Statesman, one of the city’s English-language newspapers. In luminous prose, Choudhury describes a Calcutta where “a century-old portico could fall on your head,” and the town of Dalhousie, where vendors sell “big fish heads” that point “upward like Aztec pyramids to the sun.” On College Street in Calcutta, “shopkeepers sell books the way dealers elsewhere sell crack.” He and his wife often disagree on such things as whether they should patronize the corner tea shops that employ 10-year-old boys, and, at times, their marital fights come on like the monsoon. Choudhury unearths Calcutta’s haunted past—exploring the Bengal famine, Partition, and the Naxalite revolution—and, in beautiful prose, he brings the city to life.