A Longing for Home

Description

In this memoir, Alaknanda Bagchi goes back to the city in India where she grew up and which is now called Kolkata and not Calcutta as it used to be called when she left in the 1990s for the United States. She has come back home to sell her grandmother’s house where Bagchi lived with her family during her formative years. Both the house and the city hold many memories for her, and both have changed. While she spends a whole year trying to settle her grandmother’s estate, her mind goes back to her childhood. As the memoir unfolds, snapshots of the Calcutta of the 1970s alternate with the Kolkata of today. Past and present fuse to highlight a world in which much has changed. Old homes, such as her grandmother’s, are fast giving way to high-rises; small stores where the shopkeeper knew his customers have been replaced with shopping malls; streets on which boys played cricket are filled with parked cars; and many of the old world traditions are beginning to disappear. In the midst of these changes, Bagchi seeks the world of her childhood that she perceived as one of fun and laughter, comfort and security, love and caring. During this sojourn, she finds herself oscillating between the evocative world of nostalgic recollections and the realities of the world of real estate and bureaucracy as she begins the process of bidding farewell to her home, her family, and her country