Days and Nights in Calcutta

Front Cover
This is a last candid look at India, written before the new censorship laws, and told from two very different points of view. When Clark Blaise and his Bengali wife, Bharati Mukherjee, decide to spend a year with her family, he comes as a Westerner, the stranger in a strange land, the son-in-law trying to adjust to a big Indian family and to a tradition-laden society with unfamiliar rules and patterns. After fourteen years abroad, Bharati returns as a "liberated" modern woman partly to test her memories of childhood's wonder and promise, but also to examine the woman she might have been has she stayed in India. Plunging with the Blaises into the mainstream Calcutta life, the reader experiences the constrasting Western and native cultures that are at its core, high society side by side with the ancient unchanged spectacle of raw endurance. Through the keen perceptions of these gifted writers we discover the currents underlying various events -- the gala film opening, the luncheons with "Number One" executives, the quiet mornings packaging medicine for Mother Teresa's lepers within the walled villas of old school friends--all flow together to yield a greater understanding of a culture, two people, and a marriage--dust jacket flap.

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1977)

Clark Blaise was born April 10, 1940 in Fargo, North Dakota. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and he was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University. His works include Southern Stories, Time Lord, Pittsburgh Stories, and Montreal Stories.

Bibliographic information