Book review: Deeptesh Sen’s ‘House of Song’
By Bhaswati Ghosh
Like every good poet, with House of Song Deeptesh Sen takes the reader on a journey in which she sets out to solve riddles but ends up finding delight in remaining looped within them.
On Durga’s Migrant Trails
By Bhaswati Ghosh
I await the day when I would run into someone from Delhi at a North American puja pandal on dashami. I want to experience the kolakuli magic my grandfather did in his probaash all those years ago, in what is now mine.
Book Review: Rashida Murphy’s ‘The Historian’s Daughter’
By Bhaswati Ghosh
The Historian’s Daughter engages as much with its plot twists as with its honesty and narrative sweep. The language is crisp, the imagery vibrant, and the plotlines like stable trellises for the vines they support.
Book Review: Sumana Roy’s ‘How I Became a Tree’
By Bhaswati Ghosh
She returns to Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s forest-centred novel Aranyak to unearth the mystery of man’s tense relationship with the forest. It is at once a place for finding repose as it is a resource to be exploited. Staying inside a forest all by herself enables Roy to experience the communality of trees, their shunning of individual prominence.
Book Review: Lopamudra Banerjee’s ‘Thwarted Escape’
By Bhaswati Ghosh
Thwarted Escape is a woman’s journey – not only through the alleys of memory – but also in the physical realm, from the East to the West. The narrative oscillates between the author’s life in Kolkata, India and cities in the US, where she moved post-marriage. Some of the book’s most tender parts are where the author is seen synthesizing her experiences of her home country with those of her adopted one. In doing so she realizes that despite her impulse to fly abroad, the escape from her old universe never actually happened on the emotional plane.
In the Heart of The Monster: Eight days in Mexico City (Part-II)
By Bhupinder Singh & Bhaswati Ghosh
I don’t feel like it’s a dead person’s house I’m visiting. Frida is alive and kicking, it seems, welcoming the crowd into her personal space, not shy to share her tears, convictions and even scandals with us in a way that feels honest and liberating at once.
In the Heart of The Monster: Eight days in Mexico City (Part-I)
By Bhaswati Ghosh & Bhupinder Singh
This was the cafe where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara met several times, chain smoking and drinking strong coffee, to plan the Cuban Revolution. As I enjoy eggs and hams with refried beans and look at old men being humoured by the cafe staff, I try to imagine those intoxicating times.
Balancing yin and yang in Coyoacan
By Bhaswati Ghosh
The young man emerges from the kitchen with my tea. The bag of tea steeping in a cup of hot water is one I’m not familiar with but find refreshing, especially as I sip it with bites of the biscuit the ladies have shared with us – tasting exactly like Marie biscuits sold in India.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 