Silver Fish

Author: Saikat Majumdar
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 293
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788172237134

Description

A brilliant debut novel in which personal histories crisscross to delineate the social history of a city.

A retired schoolteacher in present day Calcutta is caught in the labyrinth of rusty bureaucracy and political crime under a communist government. Across a vast ocean of time, a widow leads a life of stark suffering in a wealthy feudal household in 19th century, British-ruled Bengal, at a time when widow burning has gone out of practice but widow remarriage is far from coming into vogue.

As their stories begin to connect, they weave a larger narrative of historical forgetting, of voices that have been pushed out of a nation's memory. And what we are left with is the intriguing tale of two cities: the same geographical space separated by decades of experience and neglect.