This chapter addresses by way of multiple interviews and data collected through cookbooks the various inventive ways in which urban kitchens in Kolkata circumvented the Bengal famine of 1943; how they have sustained such culinary practices through post-memory and inter-generational transfer.

This Chapter engages with the idea of the nation especially looking at fiction and non-fiction narratives from Kashmir, through the lens of Memory--individual vs. community memory.

I rushed to your picture frame first, but it yielded nothing. No, not nothing. A certain distaste, that felt like tar in my mouth, heavy, unrelenting, dark, putrid, unpleasant.

You come rather suddenly sometimes Wake me up from the white noise We set about yet again To dust the fairy cobwebs Of reminiscence Or to shake off the bit Of rust That gathers every time We don’t talk.

Let your pen unravel what I write So carefully contrived, And all my words, You colour them grey.

She likes things to have meaning. She is used to a clock in every room at her house and the absence of it here is almost a wilful suspension of time.

He wants food. She is the giver of food. Sometimes, especially now, she feels that she has ceased to be the wife and is merely the caregiver, the provider. She picks up her bag and decides she will walk home, delaying her arrival as far as possible.

Memory works somewhat like that for you. A few days strike out marvelously, rainbow-hued, or grey, sensorial, almost all of them from travels, ever since you were a little girl.

She had always felt somewhat burdened by her name. Her name to her carried the expectations of her parents and family, which restricted her already timid movements.

She was too young to understand the full implicature of the term, but she knew the place where she stayed wasn’t home either.

Among the millions and millions of people in this city, why doesn’t he know anyone? Is he himself alive? Do the dead have any memory?

I left home one evening to head to the river, and then something strange came to pass, the river was nowhere to be found!

I looked at the nameplate once before boarding the taxi. The address was still the same- 14/A Ahiripukur Road.

The fear of the hills for me was, therefore, naturally enmeshed in the memory of the marketplace.

Ashu later realized that the angry smile of Mana’s uncle came from a place of deep-seated hurt. Every story, every poem that he had read carried an image of that pain.