A brilliant debut novel in which personal histories crisscross to delineate the social history of a city.A retired schoolteacher in present day Calcutta is caught in the labyrinth of rusty bureaucracy and political crime under a communist government. Across a vast ocean of time, a widow leads a life of stark suffering in a wealthy feudal household in 19th century, British-ruled Bengal, at a time when widow burning has gone out of practice but widow remarriage is far from coming into vogue.As their stories begin to connect, they weave a larger narrative of historical forgetting, of voices that have been pushed out of a nation’s memory. And what we are left with is the intriguing tale of two cities: the same geographical space separated by decades of experience and neglect.
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