I was in Calcutta to find a specific room among its millions and millions of rooms; a room that touched down in America in my early twenties via the magical Silk Road of cinema.
I’d previously seen the first two films of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy. They gave me my first glimpses of India: the hot, dusty villages of Bengal, the ghats of Benares, and of course Calcutta, the big city of the young writer Apu and his dingy room with its torn curtain that let in the monsoon rains. For years, I visited that room every summer at the Thalia, the art movie theatre on West 95th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, my home away from home.
Apu’s room, in Apu’s Sansaar: The World of Apu was my birthing room as a writer. How was this possible as a New Yorker? The books I read as a young man and internalized ranged from Bernards Malamud’s The Assistant to Franz Kafka’s The Trial. What made me, an alienated urban Jew in the tradition of Kafka, fail to glom onto one of his sinister courtrooms tucked away in rundown residential areas of an unnamed European city where it had no business being?
Why hadn’t I chosen one of those rooms instead?
In my mind, two answers to that question rub against each other.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 2017 من India Currents.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 2017 من India Currents.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Elephant and Donkey Tribes of Politics
The Motorcycle Guru Speaks.
On Feminism
It has been eight months since I started my MFA at Bennington College. In the last eight months I have cooked half a dozen meals. I pack my children lunches and I clean up the kitchen after my husband when he makes dinner for the family after he comes home from working in a Silicon Valley tech company. Cooking has never moved me. Motherhood has—but not the baggage of social dos and don'ts that accompanied it. I have done fewer play dates than the meals I have cooked in the past few months, and I rarely go to a birthday party. My husband takes the children to their social engagements. “But is this fair?” you might ask and I answer, “It is not about fairness, it is about what moves you as a person and how to keep that flame of what keeps you alive, burning within you, while negotiating roles in an adult world that still largely favors men over women.”
Of Wedding Bells And Hospital Bills
Not another invite,” I groaned, picking up a thick cream and red colored envelope.
A New Lease Of Life
How an Indian grandmother started making heart-healthy choices.
A Mother Loses Her Child: Fact And Fiction Coalesce
LUCKY BOY by Shanthi Sekaran. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House, New York. 472 pages. Hardcover. $27.00
From The Hood Without A Loo
TOILET: A LOVE STORY. Director Shree Narayan Singh. Players: Akshay Kumar, Bhumi Padnekar, Anupam Kher, Sudhir Pandey, Divyendu Sharma, Subha Khote. Hindi w/ Eng. Sub-tit. (Viacom).
Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness
A LIFE OF ADVENTURE AND DE- LIGHT by Akhil Sharma. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York. 202 pages. wwnorton.com $24.95 hardcover.
Who Was Enid Blyton?
Raised in and out of India, I don’t remember reading too many Enid Blyton novels—barring those from the Noddy series. I knew, though, they were all the rage among girls—mostly girls. They’d spend hours reading them and like fish in a school, prattle over what they’d read over their lunchboxes.
Victoria And Abdul: It Looks A Lot Like Love
VICTORIA AND ABDUL. Director: Stephen Frears. Screenwriter: Lee Hall, based on book by Shrabani Basu. Cast: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard, Adeel Akhtar, Tim Pigott-Smith and Michael Gambon. Focus Features, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13
Looters, Schemers And A Curse
Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond.
