Mahuldiha Days

Set deep in the forests of Bengal, India, Mahuldiha Days is the moving story of a young woman coming of age in her personal and professional life. Anita Agnihotri paints a vivid picture in this novel of life in a rural Indian setting that is quickly vanishing.

Agnihotri’s narrator retraces her childhood and early adulthood, and her intense, visual memories—including the neighborhood park that was her favorite refuge as a lonely child and the river in a tribal zone of hills and forests where she was posted for her first job as a civil servant—are recalled here in evocative detail. Her story is told with deep empathy, pausing to reflect on the bleakness of the lives of the marginalized people she comes in contact with as part of her job, as we engage with her struggles to integrate her past into a new wholeness, a new self.

Skillfully combining fiction, memoir, and essay, Agnihotri’s lyrical and passionate novel will leave no reader untouched.

Anita Agnihotri works in the Ministry of Social Justice in India. She is a Bengali writer of over twenty-five books, including Seventeen and The Awakening, both also published by Zubaan. Seventeen won the Economist-Crossword Book Award for translatino in 2011. Kalpana Bardhan is a writer and translator based in San Francisco.