The Golden Jubilee

Author: Subrata Dasgupta
Publisher: Amaryllis, New Delhi
(Pp 217, ISBN 978-93-81506-38-7, Rs 325)

As the name suggests, the book is woven around the Golden Jubilee wedding anniversary celebration of a Bengali-American couple. But it is not just that, all the family members gather together for the special day and it becomes as much a time of bonds lost and recovered, a time of remembrance of long-buried and willfully forgotten pasts, of confessions and self-discovery, of acceptances and rejections and a time when old personal conundrums are finally resolved. It can be a story of any household.

The narratives are a succession of first person tales, which are good in the sense that they show how each individual thinks but sometimes it seems a repetition of the instances. But, the story looks very real and makes us think of our own family ties.

–Varsha Verma