Freedom Song is a novel about family life and city life at an uneasy moment in time.
A world of insight and feeling emerges from Amit Chaudhuri\'s wonderfully expansive sentences, and style is revealed as nothing less than a form of knowledge..
A novel of ordinary life, of work and love, shadowed by larger uncertainty, Freedom Song is a transfixing performance, deeply humane and winningly humorous, by one of the subtlest and sharpest writers of our time.
Freedom Song circles around this small upper-middleclass world, with its customs, memories, pleasures, and worries, but also ventures out into the wider world, in which the destruction of the venerable Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists has started a cycle of sectarian violence.
He engages in street theater, and while no longer in his first youth, he remains unmarried.
He sells the party newspaper on the streets.
Everyone is concerned about his son, Bhaskar, who has recently joined the Communist Party.
Khuku\'s brother, Bhola, lives nearby with his wife and two grown children.
Khuku\'s old friend Mini, a teacher suffering from a bad case of arthritis, is paying a visit, which gives the two women a chance to gossip and reminisce and see the town.
Set in Calcutta in 1993, the book begins by introducing us to Khuku, whose husband Shib is a retired executive and whose son has gone to live in America.
Freedom Song is a novel about family life and city life at an uneasy moment in time
