Change and decay | 17 August 2017

Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated from the occasion, ‘I was sipping tea in Nimtala, present in the moment at the centre of our world’. It’s Choudhury’s longing to be back in this centre, which might have seemed less than obviously central to a metropolitan American, that takes him to Calcutta after he graduates from Princeton. He spends a few years working at the Statesman, Calcutta’s most venerable English newspaper, and later returns to the city, eventually getting married to his girlfriend, who happens also to be an American of Bengali origin.

Such returns aren’t unheard of, but they are unusual, though they also often seem to be associated with literary production — Suketu Mehta’s 2004 Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, for example, followed the author’s return to his birthplace. At the start of The Epic City, Choudhury’s return seems less purposeful or directed.