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As the New Year arrives in New York, Guddo prepares a havan – a fire offering – she has put off for a decade, too busy surviving to risk smoke alarms, neighbours, and memory. As family crowds into her apartment, the mantras she recites begin to loosen the past: a widow remade into an immigrant; a proud life of “respectability” traded for the humiliations of subway platforms, night shifts, cramped rooms, and the unspoken accounting that governs even sisterhood.

Guddo came to America for her children’s future. What she finds instead is the slow, bruising cost of arrival: the erosion of old certainties, the sharp bargains of work and citizenship, and a generation growing up between languages and loyalties – hungry for freedom, status, and speed. In the city’s relentless churn, love can turn transactional, care can become leverage, and danger can flash, sudden and intimate, in the spaces meant to be ordinary.

Birdsong in the Night and Other Stories is a collection of stories by Sunil Gangopadhyay – one of Bengal’s most celebrated modern writers – where...

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