LOOKING FOR AN ADDRESS

Set in the 1990’s New York, when Rudy Giuliani was the Mayor and Bill Clinton was the President, Looking for an Address explores the lives of several South Asian Bengali men and women from both Bangladesh and India, and their interactions with ‘native born Americans’ like Gloria, Joshua, and Benjamin. With her keen power of observation, Nabaneeta Dev Sen (‘Sahitya Akademi Awards’, 1999, 2019) depicts in this novel with touching sensitivity the intersection of the immigrants’ lives in New York as they search for their individual ‘addresses’. The notion of address gradually expands beyond the physical to embrace ‘refuge’ from racial disparity in case of Gloria and the ‘ideal of love’ in case of Benjamin and Jhilli, a young woman from Kolkata who came to New York.