THE EPIC CITY

A fresh, entertaining memoir about how we sometimes discover our true home only after
we've left it.

The immigrant myth tells us that the past is gone, the future awaits—start over. But, as all migrants well know, dreams of home are powerful things, drawing us to our deepest impulses for a shared identity, luring us back to a time and place impossible to forget—even as memories inevitably fade, the desire for return seems to grow.

Kushanava Choudhury'sTHE EPIC CITY is the funny, touching, insightful memoir of a man who followed those dreams back to Calcutta, the fascinating megacity of his childhood, in search of an elusive feeling of completion, driven by what he calls an overwhelming “ambivalent passion” for his family's and his city's storied past, and the complex cultural history he carries within.

By the time Kush was 12, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times, “flipping back and forth between continents like a dual voltage appliance.” His parents were Indian scientists, “torn between nation and vocation. Twice they moved to America, twice they moved back. They were unwilling to leave their country and they were unable to stay. “

And so, Kush and his parents migrated – for the last time! -- to the suburbs of New Jersey. But the summer after his sophomore year at Princeton University he interned at The Statesman, Calcutta's biggest English newspaper and was hooked --for reasons he could not fully articulate, reasons which would only reveal themselves through the telling of this story.

THE EPIC CITY is structured around Kush's lovingly witty, often poignant tales of his extended, eccentric once-wealthy Calcutta family and his circle of friends as he makes a life for himself in a place that is familiar and foreign, welcoming and strange. As Kush goes about his day, he takes us into the various teeming “paras,” to grubby union halls and quaint used-book stalls, refugee colonies and crumbling colonial ruins, riverfront crematoriums and hidden lovers' parks, minuscule sweet shops and alleyway bars where hours can be idled away in “addas,” the art of deep conversation about nothing at all. Calcutta's character and recent history is slowly revealed as we meet matriarch Grandma Dida, who remembers the lush glamour of Raj Calcutta and Uncle Ashoke, a Berkeley architectural student whose youthful goals of renovating the perpetually impoverished, falling apart city are now limited to home renovations. We come to know his hovering neighbors Sugato and Janyati, who cook dinners of fish curry and rice for Kush in his bachelor days, then retire to read the novels of Doris Lessing. We're introduced to Mike Flannery, hard-bitten expatriate newspaperman who teaches Kush the ropes, Sumitro Basak, an outspoken artist from the picturesque 19th century Bowbazar district and finally Durba, Kush's sensible wife-to-be who is also a reverse migrant to the city. Their unending hunt for a suitable apartment assisted by an assortment of supposedly connected but completely crooked “brokers” captures perfectly the mixture of charm, calculation and chaos that is Calcutta, where nothing happens andeverything happens, the past haunts the present, the poor soldier through and life goes determinedly on, exactly the unique yet universal place in the world Kush trusted it would be.
Kushanava Choudhury was a Senior Fellow in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale and an undergraduate degree from Princeton. In his junior year, he was one of 16 students in John McPhee's legendary nonfiction writing seminar. His articles have appeared in The Statesman, The New York Times, rediff.com, The Telegraph (India) and Business Day (South Africa). THE WORLD ON THE STREET is his book debut.