Sankar (Mani Sankar Mukherji) is one of Bengal's most widely read
novelists. He also has several non-fiction bestsellers, including a
biography of Swami Vivekananda, to his credit. Two of his novels,
Seemabaddha (Company Limited) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman),
were turned into films by Satyajit Ray. In 2007, the English translation
of his novel Chowringhee was published by Penguin to huge critical
and commercial success. He lives and works in Kolkata.
In this sequel to Chowringhee, the third instalment in the life and tribulations
of the naÌøve and innocent young Shanker, he is once again out of a job
and without a roof on his head. After much difficulty he finds a job as a
manager in a grand but crumbling building in the posh area of the city:
Thackeray Mansion on Scudder Street. The narrator directs his keen eye
and sympathetic ear to tell captivating stories of those who live in the
homes within a home of Thackeray Mansion, and those who work in it. The
mysterious disappearance of Philip sahib‰۪s wife, the hilarious monologues
of the feisty Poppy Biswas and the grouchy Baradaprasanna, the seductive
Sulekha Sen who morphs into the respectable Seema Chatterjee, and
the love of Dorothy Watts for Rabindranath Tagore: stories nestle within
stories and the result is an astonishing novel filled with joys and sorrows,
laughter and tears, despair and hope.
