The epic city The world on the streets of Calcutta

Calcutta today is a far cry from the proud center of commerce and society it represented in centuries past. Now, up-and-comers like Delhi have left Calcutta in their dust as India reinvents itself for the modern economy. But for Choudhury, whose family moved from Calcutta to New Jersey when he was 11, the city of his childhood exerts an irresistible pull that brought him back, first to work for the city's flagship newspaper and then to begin his life as a married man. With a deep sense of history and tradition, Choudhury uncovers the treasures that are contained in the fabric of the city, from the freewheeling intellectual conversations known in Bengali as adda to the connections that bond residents to their neighborhoods. Choudhury himself seems to be searching for the reasons he would trade his comfortable life in America for the chaos of a city that all but the oldest members of his family left long ago. As he vividly describes, the Calcutta he discovers is by turns exasperating and exhilarating, but always fascinating.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist

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. (Jan. 2018) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.