Samir Shukla
My Write to Right
A flight to freedom from India to America
Author: Purnima (Mital) Gupta
(Page Publishing)
This book is essentially a huge collection (nearly 550 pages) of diary entries. Gupta, who is based in Raleigh, NC, has collected decades of entries, dated and annotated, about her deeply personal revelations of struggles, and recollections expanded into a huge word count while pursuing a lifelong quest to find personal happiness. Interspersed flashbacks and photographs marking different points of her life add to the book.
Gupta writes, “I write my biography that I have no right to write and even after writing not to assume it is right. I have been wronged from birth by my own family. Yet I find my life to be exemplary as an educated female, brought up in a chauvinist culture and struggling to get validated as an individual…. The first-generation immigrants have struggled to establish themselves in the midst of interracial conflicts and little family support. Their children started out with an incomplete family picture, were raised in dual cultures and ended up split between wrongs and rights. Their relationships with their children are need-based or lost. Many of them don’t get to see their grandchildren, let alone get to bond with them.”
This is memoir switches back and forth between her life in India and later in America, stitched with the dynamics of an Indian-American family.
Gupta has also written several books of Hindi poetry, short stories, and biographical sketches.
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Samir Shukla is Editor of Saathee. Reach him at [email protected].
