“Can love-making be like gorging?
No … Is that how the Bengali gentleman eats?
Doesn’t he need the entire spread of panchabyanjan, all five flavours in his sumptuous meals? From the bitter to the sweet? Doesn’t he enjoy being fanned while he eats? And the box of paan at the end? Love-making’s like that.”
Women fight; they remember; they forget; in the twilight of their days they weep and curse their children and fellow lodgers in a shelter home.
As they open up about the lives they lived and left behind, the closed world of relationships of women within their homes implodes on every page: anger, intolerance, and the inevitable unfolding of power at different stages in a woman’s lifespan; the tension between different generations of women; and their dependence on men, both economic and emotional.
Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s genius for retrieving the past is matched by the wonderfully powerful lyric quality of this novella.