Looking for an Address is, at heart, a portrait of a diaspora learning to live, love, and improvise in a city that is both bewildering and full of possibility.
The story follows Jhilli, newly arrived from Kolkata and suddenly swept into the Bengali immigrant world of New York City. What she encounters is not a tidy or uniform community, but a shifting constellation of people who have crossed oceans for different reasons-ambition, escape, heartbreak, hope-and who now find themselves bound together by shared language, familiar food, and the fragile comfort of recognition. Apartments become gathering places, weekend meals turn into emotional lifelines, and friendships form with the urgency of people trying to build a sense of home from scratch.
The depiction of immigrant life is affectionate but never sentimental. She shows the exhilaration of newfound freedom alongside the ache of displacement, the tug of old expectations against the demands of a new country, and the quiet negotiations required to survive. Jhilli's circle is full of taxi drivers who trade stories of Dhaka and Kolkata at dawn, young professionals juggling multiple jobs, women navigating marriage and independence, and men trying to keep family ties alive across continents. Their struggles with visas, finances, loneliness, and cultural friction are rendered with a clarity that makes the community feel vivid and deeply human.
Through Jhilli's relationships-both within the Bengali circle and with Americans who enter her orbit-the novel explores how immigrant communities become bridges between cultures. It asks what one keeps from home, what one must let go, and how reinvention becomes both a necessity and a risk. The result is a nuanced portrayal of identity in motion, shaped as much by collective experience as by individual longing.
For readers drawn to stories of diaspora, urban belonging, and the messy beauty of community, Looking for an Address offers a richly textured immersion into Bengali immigrant life in 1990s New York. It is a novel where humor and vulnerability coexist, where characters feel startlingly real, and where the search for an "address" becomes a metaphor for finding one's place in a world that is constantly shifting. The notion of 'address' gradually expands beyond the physical to embrace 'refuge' from racial disparity in the case of Gloria and the 'ideal of love' in the case of Benjamin and Jhilli.
Translated from the Bengali Thikana, Looking for an Address retains the wit, tenderness, and clarity that define Dev Sen's writing. It is a novel that feels intimate in its details and expansive in its themes, offering a richly textured depiction of diaspora life that remains strikingly relevant. For readers drawn to stories of migration, identity, and the messy beauty of community, this book offers a deeply human exploration of what it means to search for belonging-and to discover that "home" is often something we build together.
Nabaneeta Dev Sen (1938-2019) was a highly acclaimed creative writer with more than seventy five publications and was equally powerful in an astounding variety of genres. She has been recognized with 'Padmashri', 'Sahitya Akademi Award' (twice) and 'Bangla Akademi Lifetime Achievement Award', to name a few. She represented Indian writing at various international festivals and received worldwide acclaim. Retired as a Professor of Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, she was Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecturer at Oxford University and held the Maytag Chair of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at Colorado University, USA. She was the President of 'Soi', Women Writers' Association of West Bengal, India until her death at her residence in Kolkata.
Dr. Chhanda Chattopadhyay Bewtra is an Emerita Professor of Pathology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska. She has published in both English and Bengali. Her translations include Distant Thunder ('Ashani Sanket'), and Ichhamoti by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Sati's Remains ('Satideha') by Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay.
