Ring Of Spices

by Sandip Roy

Cape Cod Morning,1950 by Edward Hopper

When Romola was seven years old her aunt Ila visited from England. She brought her boxes of delicious chocolates filled with strawberries and hazelnuts and pretty dresses trimmed with lace. But what Romola loved best was to carefully open her Ila-pishi’s suitcase and breathe in the fragrance of her clothes and cosmetics.

‘Lavender, lilac, rosemary,’ she would whisper to herself making a daisy-chain of flowers she had never seen.

It was a scorchingly hot summer, even by Calcutta standards. In the afternoons her aunt would draw the blinds and take a nap. Romola would tiptoe into the dark room and carefully open the suitcase. Then she would bury her head in the soft cottons and smooth silks and breathe deeply and surreptitiously. It was like a little corner of England trapped in there. She would feel herself falling through it and leaving the hot parched Calcutta streets and the relentlessly blue Indian skies far behind. It smelled cool and fresh and shaded, so unlike the ripe kitchen smells that clung to her mother’s sari — turmeric and sweat and stale talcum powder.

‘Foxglove, primrose, daffodil.’

Crouched near the suitcase like a little mouse, Romola wished she could pack herself in with the soft nightgowns and synthetic saris. She imagined waking up and finding she was in England.

She was now walking down a little cobbled street past houses like the picture on her tin of biscuits. She was going home to have scones and strawberries and cream. Her house had a pointed tiled roof and a chimney. And ivy on the walls, or was it honeysuckle?
‘Honeysuckle, bluebells, forget-me-not.’
‘Romola!’ her mother’s shrill voice could be heard from downstairs ‘Where is that girl?’
‘Romola, you haven’t finished your rice. Come now or the cat will get it.’
‘Romola, check to see the door is closed.’
‘Romola, have you done your homework?’
Romola decided that when she grew up she would go to England.

Avinash was not quite from England. He was from Illinois. Romola knew of only one city in Illinois — Chicago — but he lived far away from it in some small university town called Carbondale in the southern end of the state where he was just finishing his PhD in Economics or something like that. It all sounded very difficult and dull to Romola. She liked to read Wordsworth and Keats and Jibanananda Das. But everyone said Avinash was a good match for her. He was serious, academic and sober. Romola’s aunt’s in-laws lived next door to Avinash’s family. Romola’s aunt played matchmaker. Avinash’s mother had said she was determined to get her son married this time when he visited from America. They wanted a simple, quick wedding before he had to go back. ‘You can’t do better,’ Romola’s aunt told her mother. ‘They don’t want any dowry and she will go to America. And the family is very cultured. Absolutely top class. His mother is recently widowed and anxious to see him settled.’

‘My son’, said Avinash’s mother to Romola’s over a cup of tea, ‘has always been the top boy in his class. “A model student” his principal called him. Never one to wander the streets like these other roadside Romeos. That was why I never had the slightest fear sending him to America. You know, Mrs Dutt, it’s all about upbringing and family. If you bring him up right, then why should you be worried, na?’

Romola’s mother nodded. She was having a hard time getting a word in edge ways but the boy looked good on paper. She glanced at Romola who was sitting demurely in a pale pink sari (‘something that will bring out the colour in your cheeks without being too flashy,’ her mother had said). Romola’s face betrayed nothing.

‘Everyone told me,’ continued Avinash’s mother, ‘see, one day he’ll call and announce he wants to marry some American girl. But I said, “I trust my Avi. He would not break his mother’s heart.” Arrey, he is my only son. He knows his duty. But I had faith and look at him now. Do you know he has had papers published in important journals? Why, my friend Sulata said to me, “Mark my words if your Avi does not get the Nobel Prize one day.”’

In the pause that ensued as all assembled digested this piece of information, Romola’s mother jumped in. ‘So how long before he finishes that PhD?’

‘Very soon,’ said his mother defensively, ‘I’ve been telling him for so long now — get married, get married. But he said, “First I must fi nish my master’s.” Then it was, “Oh I must complete my PhD and get a job, Ma. How will I have a family on a student’s income?” So responsible, na? But then after his father passed away so suddenly, a massive heart attack, I said, “Enough Avi. Now I have to see you settle down with a good girl. Then only can I shut my eyes in peace.” He said, “But I am not done with my studies yet,” and I said “Bas. I will not listen any more to your excuses.”

‘Beautiful girls grow on trees for boys in America,’ she continued, glancing at Romola who looked back at her expressionlessly. ‘But good family and education are what we really value. Avi’s father was a renowned professor, you know — he wrote three books. And I hear your Romola has an MA in English Literature.’

Romola smiled and inclined her head.

After Avinash’s mother left, Romola said, ‘I have to go lie down with an eau-de-cologne handkerchief on my forehead. That woman gave me a splitting headache with her non-stop bokbok.’

‘Oh, but mothers are like that about only sons,’ said her mother. ‘Anyway, you are lucky. You won’t even have to live with her. You’ll just go to America with Avinash.’

By the standards of the time Avinash and Romola had a bit of a courtship. Avinash took Romola out for dinner once. He was a slight man with thinning hair and owlish glasses. He smelt faintly of some lemony aftershave. They did not have much in common. She knew nothing about economics; he had long forgotten his Wordsworth. They concentrated instead on the food and discussed the merits of the tandoori chicken. When they exhausted that topic, they ate in silence listening to the ebb and fl ow of conversation at the tables around them.

‘What was he like?’ asked her mother.
‘All right, I suppose,’ she answered.

At the time the only man, outside of cousins, she’d ever been out with was a young man she’d met through her friend
Leela. He was a handsome man with a nose as straight as a knife-edge and thick waves of black hair. When she walked into a restaurant with him she noticed young women at nearby tables look at him out of the corners of their eyes. She had enjoyed that. But he wanted to be an actor and Romola knew that wasn’t going anywhere. Her mother had tolerated him as a friend but she would never allow an actor as a son-in-law. Though she had not found much in common with Avinash she had not found anything objectionable either. At least he did not wear those loud colourful shirts with big flowers that she had seen American tourists wear.

Only once she said, almost wistfully, ‘You know I really wanted to go to England.’

Her uncle laughed and said, ‘Romola, Wordsworth’s England is long dead. In your grandfather’s time people would go
to England, for then England still had power and glory. Now it is truly becoming a nation of shopkeepers. And most of the shopkeepers are Indian anyway. You are lucky, you are going to the richest country in the world.’

‘And such a brilliant husband,’ added her mother.‘And so courteous and well-mannered,’ chipped in her aunt. ‘I hope my daughter is as lucky as you.’

Romola shrugged and said nothing. She was not sure if flowers like lavender and primrose grew in America. Perhaps, she thought, she’d have a small garden there and she could grow them.

At the wedding she glanced at Avinash as they went around the fire seven times. His gaze seemed far away, his brow furrowed in thought. She wondered what he was thinking. Was he imagining his life in America and worrying how she would fit in there? She realized they had talked about his interests and her interests but nothing about their lives together. She didn’t know what kind of house he lived in. Did he even want to get married? What had he told his mother when he had come back from dinner? That she was ‘all right’ as well?

With the white topor on his head like an ornate dunce cap, little dots of sandalwood paste on his forehead, she thought he looked slightly ridiculous. She could see beads of sweat sparkling on his brow. She debated offering him the neatly folded handkerchief she had tucked into the fold of her red-and-gold sari, just in case her own make-up started to run. But in the end she did nothing at all, quietly walking around the fire, her eyes smarting from the crackling smoke, the priest’s chants buzzing around her. When she lifted her head to allow him to put the garland around her neck, her aunts squealed with excitement.

This is supposed to be the most important moment in my life, thought Romola smelling the flowers, trying to imprint the scene in her memory. The smell of wet rajanigandha stayed with her all night, a sickly smudge of perfume still clinging to her long after they had removed the heavy garlands from around their necks.

‘Now put that garland around your husband’s neck,’ said the priest in her ear. As Romola reached up, Avinash looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time. He smiled slightly but the tinge of that smile dried up before it reached his eyes. He looks lost, thought Romola, suddenly feeling tender, an anxious, lost boy.

Later that night Romola saw herself reflected in a mirror on the bedroom wall and stopped, startled. She was married. The parting in her hair was filled with red sindoor, which Avinash (‘my husband’) had poured into her hair with unsteady hands. Specks of the red powder had landed on her nose and cheeks, dusting them, soft as pollen. Their bed was decorated with a curtain of white rajanigandha and velvety red roses. She pushed the strands aside to sit down, still in the heavy wedding sari. There were rose petals scattered on the new white sheets — like specks of blood. ‘You must be tired,’ said Avinash without really looking at her. ‘Tonight let’s just sleep.’ Romola was a little relieved. She was tired and nervousness knotted her stomach. As she lay down she worried about how she would be able to sleep listening to him breathing beside her. Did he snore? she fretted right before she fell asleep.

The week after the wedding was a blur of dinners and relatives. Romola spent most of her time at her mother’s, getting ready to leave for America while Avinash stayed at his. Romola was amazed at how easily she left India behind. Her mother and aunt wept copiously at the airport while her uncle kept offering everyone cups of tea. But Romola was calm as if she was an actor in someone else’s script.

As the airplane left the airport she looked out of the window at the lights of Calcutta growing smaller and smaller. She had a sense of her past, her ties, her home all falling away behind her like an unravelling sari. Perhaps, she thought, sipping her Coca-Cola, I was not meant to be Indian at all. She glanced over at Avinash, seated next to her, absorbed in the latest issue of Time. This was really the first time she had been alone with him since the wedding night — if one could be alone in an airplane filled with strangers. Sometimes she hardly felt married at all. He glanced up at her and, finding himself caught in her gaze, looked away guiltily. Then he said quietly, ‘How do you imagine America?’

‘America — I don’t know,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Big buildings, fast cars, movies.’

‘Washing machines,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘Lawnmowers, ovens.’ Then she thought for a while and said with a smile, ‘My aunt had a magazine about how to entertain in America. They had a recipe for a turkey. I always wondered what it might taste like. Have you ever eaten a turkey?’

‘Yes, it’s not that exciting,’ he replied. Then he added, ‘You never thought of America as freedom?’

‘Freedom?’ she was perplexed. ‘No, not really.’ Then she smiled slightly and said, ‘Maybe it was for you when you went there as a student. But I am going there as your wife.’

‘That’s true,’ he replied.

‘Are you afraid that now that I am going with you, you will lose your freedom?’ she asked half-teasingly.

‘Who is really free anyway?’ he answered without looking at her and returned to the magazine. She opened her mouth to speak but he seemed to have drawn curtains around himself.

Romola hated America from the moment she stepped off that plane. At the immigration counter, she couldn’t understand a thing the man in the uniform said. She knew it was English but the words seemed foreign, tangled together like a ball of wool. The accents were jarring — they had none of the clean crispness of the BBC World Service programmes she so loved and listened to on her father’s prized short-wave radio. She stared at the man, baffled, and then looked to Avinash for help.

‘It’s okay,’ said Avinash to the man. ‘This is my wife’s first time in the US. She is still getting used to things. We just got married.’ He was suddenly in charge, thought Romola. The nervous lost boy in the wedding dhoti was gone, sloughed off in Calcutta.

‘Congratulations,’ said the immigration man, his teeth white against his bristly black moustache. ‘Welcome to America.’

Romola thought she should say something. But instead she just nodded and quickly looked away.

Avinash’s house was nothing like the quaint cottages with their filigree of honeysuckle she remembered from the biscuit tins. He lived in a non-descript one-bedroom apartment in a squat blue-grey concrete block of identical buildings each with a stubbly patch of green lawn in front. For some reason it was called Nile Apartments though Romola could detect nothing Egyptian about it. There was a child’s bicycle lying on the lawn in front of his apartment and old newspapers near the front door, the newsprint discoloured into a brittle yellow. As they walked up the stairs she could hear the television in the apartment below going at full blast. She could smell something cooking, something fried. For a moment she felt a twinge of hunger and wondered what they would eat for dinner. Would he expect her to cook? Did he have things like rice and cumin and coriander in his kitchen?

When Avinash turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open her heart sank. The apartment smelled of trapped air and stale food. ‘I should have left a window open,’ he said apologetically. Romola said nothing. On a dining table she could see an old overripe banana in a fruit basket, its yellow skin blotched with black leopard spots. She could almost taste that banana from the door — its rich and cloying smell pooling around her stickily. She suddenly lost her appetite. ‘Let’s get some pizza,’ said Avinash. ‘Would you like that?’ She just nodded.

That night, as they lay in bed jet-lagged and trying to sleep, Avinash turned to her and tentatively stroked her arm. When he raised his face to kiss her, Romola could smell the bath soap on him. Lime, she thought. He smelled cool. He kissed her on the lips, his eyes closed. Her heart thudded wildly. For a moment she longed to be back in her bedroom in Calcutta. She wanted the hum of traffic around her, the sudden blare of horns, the voices of people walking on the street at all hours of the day, snatches of conversation trailing through the air, the yapping dogs, the cheerfully noisy night. Here the night felt almost naked in its silence, filling the room with just the harsh sound of his breath and the drumbeat of her heart. She heard him curse softly as he fumbled with the drawstring of his pyjamas. She felt his hands pulling at the pale blue nightdress her aunt had bought her from New Market a week before the wedding.

Her friend Leela who had got married two years before had told her the first time would hurt. But she hadn’t realized it would be so short. Avinash climbed on top of her, still wearing his nightshirt, though she could feel the bare skin of his legs on her. His fingers digging into her arms, he tried to position himself between her legs. When he finally managed to get inside her she gasped at the sudden tearing pain, biting her tongue, tasting the salt of her blood, afraid that any sound would carry through the silent night, startling the neighbours. But almost before she could get used to the feeling of Avinash inside her, he was done. She realized that his eyes had been shut throughout. She wondered if she should have closed her eyes as well. He lay on her limply as if all the air had drained out of him and then patted her gently on the cheek. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Are you okay?’ It was the first thing he had said in bed.

‘I am okay,’ she said. ‘But I need to clean up.’

In the bathroom she stood at the sink and gingerly lifted up her nightdress to touch herself between her legs. She didn’t want to look. She just wanted to stand under the shower and let everything wash away.

When she came back he was already asleep. She stood at the window staring out at the patches of grass outside. The child’s bicycle still lay on its side, like a capsized ship. Across the lawn one of the apartments still had the light on. She could see the blue-grey flicker of a television set. She wanted to throw open the window and lean out into the night and breathe deeply. What kind of flowers bloomed here at night? What did an American night smell of, she wondered. But she was afraid she’d wake Avinash. He slept curled up on one side of the bed, his arm sprawled across the pillow where she had been. She looked at his face splashed with the moonlight and thought to herself, ‘He is quite pleasant-looking, really. Tomorrow it will be better. Desire will come. Desire will grow.’

She wondered what time it was in India. Lunchtime, probably. She closed her eyes and imagined her mother serving lunch. She could almost smell the rice. She carefully clutched that smell to her, like an amulet, as she crept back into bed.

By the time she woke in the morning he was already up and she could hear the hiss of the shower. ‘Good morning,’ he said with a smile when he came out towelling his hair. ‘Welcome to America.’

But Romola never quite felt welcome. The freeways with their whizzing cars and many lanes terrifi ed her. She could not imagine ever being able to drive on them. Yet Avinash had told her that if you did not know how to drive here you were a prisoner. She was confused by all the machines she needed to handle and all the buttons she had to press to do anything. The first time she took the laundry down to the basement of their building she just turned around and left, unable to decipher the hieroglyphics of all those settings on the washing machine. But most of all she missed having people to talk to.

Two days after they came to America, Avinash returned to school. Research was busy he told her. He had lots of catching up to do. ‘Don’t wait for me,’ he said when he left in the morning. Soon he spent long hours at school, sometimes coming home after she had gone to bed. She would lie in the dark hearing the purr of the microwave as he warmed his dinner. As a little girl she remembered her mother always waited for her father to come home before she ate. But Romola invariably got a headache if she let herself go hungry too long. She would leave his dinner on the table in front of the jar of mango pickles she had found in the international section of the grocery store. She would lie in bed and try and figure out what he was eating.

‘He must be finished with the dal, he is probably on the chicken now.’ She would hear him open the refrigerator as he took out some Coke. They needed to get more Coke and detergent and something else. She knitted her brows and tried to remember what. Soon she knew she would hear the tap running as he rinsed the dishes and then the clank as he loaded them into the old green dishwasher. That was when she closed her eyes and turned on her side, away from his half of the bed. She wanted him to reach out to her, to apologize, to kiss her, to make her turn around and face him. But he did not seem to mind that she had gone to bed. She would feel the bed sag as he climbed on to it. Then the sharp minty smell of toothpaste. In a little while she would hear his gentle easy breathing and she would lie awake angry, making grocery lists in her head.

Within one month she felt she had been in America forever, the routine of their lives already engraved. All week he worked late. On Saturdays they would go grocery shopping. Sometimes they would go to a fi lm at the theatre near the university. Afterwards they would stop at an Italian place near campus. He would drink one beer. She would have a Coke with her pasta. Sometimes upon his encouragement she’d try a glass of wine even though she did not much like the taste. When they came home they would have sex. Now she shut her eyes as well. Once, the face of the actor she had once gone out with slipped into her head as Avinash panted over her. It was so vivid she opened her eyes with a start almost convinced Avinash could see it too, that it hung between them like a picture projected on her face. But Avinash’s eyes were still closed.

She thought once of writing to her mother, asking her whether she needed to do something. Who was supposed to tell her these things? But instead she wrote long letters about the weather, about meals she was cooking, about how the international store didn’t stock any panchphoran spices though it had most of everything else she needed.

Soon Romola too had her own rituals. After Avinash left for school she washed the cereal bowls. She examined the refrigerator and made a grocery list. She made lunch for herself always making a little extra in case Avinash stopped by unexpectedly to eat.

Around two o’clock every day she ran down to check the mail. She had even come to know the postman. He always said, ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ But usually all she got were catalogues from department stores and letters addressed to Current Resident. She would spend the afternoon reading about furniture sales and instalment plans to buy home entertainment systems. Apart from that all they seemed to get were bills and coupons from pizza joints.

She had written two letters home but had not got anything back. Letters from India could take three weeks, sometimes longer, Avinash told her, if they didn’t get lost.

It was over a month after they had arrived when she got her first letter from India. It had been raining all day — a fine dispiriting drizzle. It was a Saturday but Avinash had needed to go to school to grade papers. She had wanted to walk down to the library but was stuck indoors, since Avinash had taken their umbrella to his office. Frustrated, she had spent the whole day rearranging her spices. She had poured them into individual little spice jars and then labelled the jars in her best handwriting. For a while she debated whether to write the Bengali names or the English ones — holud, jeerey and dhoney or turmeric, cumin, coriander? She fi nally decided on ‘Turmeric’ ‘Cumin’ ‘Coriander’. But she did not know the word for methi so she left it blank. She smelled her hands — and suddenly remembered her mother cooking and then wiping her hands on her sari. Her old saris always had turmeric stains.

Seeing the little postal truck pull out of the driveway Romola wiped her hands on a paper towel and ran downstairs to get the mail. And there it was, a neat rectangular envelope with a whole line of crookedly stuck postage stamps on it — her first bona fide letter from India. The familiar bald head of Gandhi and the smudged postmark made her heart twist. She didn’t wait to recognize the handwriting and there was no return address on the envelope. She raced up to the apartment two steps at a time, smiling, tossed the rest of the mail on the dining table, pulled out the Kashmiri letter-cutter her friend Leena had given her and slit open the envelope. There were two sheets in there — ruled sheets torn from a writing pad.

Dear Avinash,

Oh, she thought, it’s for him. Maybe it’s his mother. But she kept reading, greedy for news from home.

Your wedding invitation came in the mail the other day. Not even a handwritten note with it. I guess I should say congratulations and send you felicitations for a long and happy married life as they do in those wedding telegrams. But pardon me if I am unable to do that. I wonder though why you never bothered to call or let me know. After all, after everything we shared, didn’t you owe me at least that much?

My mother said your father passed away suddenly. My condolences. Perhaps it was all too much for you. I don’t know. I was hoping somehow that you would be waiting for me in America. Remember we told each other that all we needed to do was find our own way there and then no one could stop us from doing what we wanted.

I wanted to surprise you by telling you I had finally secured admission to graduate school in the United States. I guess the surprise ended up being mine, getting your wedding invitation. I was hoping that once we were there away from the prying eyes of families we’d be able to live the life we dreamed about during those evenings in Calcutta.

Now it tastes like dust in my mouth. I feel betrayed that you couldn’t be stronger. Couldn’t you have waited longer? Or did you feel, since whatever we had was a secret anyway, we could just carry on as before? Hadn’t we promised to be together, the world be damned? Did you think it was just a phase we’d outgrow like children do with their clothes?

I never asked you to tell the world. I just hoped you might wait for me. I wrote and rewrote this letter three times wondering whether I’d ever send it. I don’t really expect you to reply.

Yours
Sumit

Sumit, she read the name over and over again. What kind of name was that? No one had ever mentioned a Sumit to her. That’s a man’s name, she told herself. Sumita, maybe it was meant to be Sumita. But what kind of letter was this? Who was this Sumit? What was he talking about? It’s some kind of silly mistake, she thought. It’s some kind of joke. Avinash will explain it all.

Outside the rain had stopped. The sun was finally breaking through. Romola sat at the dining table feeling her heart slowly turn cold inside her. She held the letter up to her nose as if trying to breathe in the Calcutta air trapped inside it, as if she could unread the words. In her head she retraced her steps down the stairs, down to the mailbox. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself again open the mailbox, look at the pizza coupons, leaf through the furniture sale catalogues and come upon the letter from India. This time she didn’t open the letter. This time she saw Avinash’s name on it and she just laid it down on his pile of mail. If only she didn’t open it, everything could stay the same. Today was Saturday. Today they would have pizza and watch a film. Avinash had said Breakfast at Tiffany’s was playing. She had wanted to see that. She really had.

She put the letter down with shaking hands. Then she picked up the pages and turned them around as if she could rearrange the words to say something else. Four times she lifted the receiver to call Avinash. Four times she put it down.

‘You are lucky,’ her mother had told her the night before she got married. ‘You don’t have to worry about making your mother-in-law happy, like we did. You can just honeymoon with your husband like a modern couple. You can do what you want — there’s no one looking over your shoulder.’

Romola wondered if she was in India what she would have done. Would she have gone home and talked to her mother? Would she have called her cousins? Would they know what to do? Could they fix him? Could they teach her how? Her thoughts rattled inside her head like a window shutter banging in a storm. ‘I need to be calm,’ she told herself. ‘I need to think.’

She had wanted things. She had wanted to travel in America with her husband. She had wanted an album of photographs — of her in front of the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge.

She sat and stared at the neatly arranged spices and tried to remember the English for methi. Maybe she should just write ‘Methi’. She wondered what would happen to her now. How much did a one-way fare to India cost? She sat and watched one television programme after another, letting the images drip meaninglessly in front of her. When Avinash came home she was already in bed.

‘It’s only seven-thirty,’ he said. ‘Are you angry? I am sorry, I got stuck. We can still make the late show.’

She didn’t answer him. Her eyes were wide open memorizing the wall beside the bed, tracing every crack, every bubble in the paint, etching it into her head — a relief map of her American life. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

‘Are you all right?’ Avinash asked anxiously.

She lay curled up on her side, her fists clenched in her mouth to prevent herself from screaming. She buried her face in the pillow and tried to summon up the old familiar smells of home.

‘Turmeric, coriander, cumin,’ she whispered fiercely as if in exorcism.

But all she could smell was the happy lemon-lime spring fresh smell of freshly laundered sheets. She buried her face deeper, trying desperately to go home.

She felt him approaching the bed.

Mustard, poppyseed, methi. She was drawing a ring of spices to protect herself.

She felt his hand on her forehead — cold and clammy. She flinched, shrinking away from his touch. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, his voice low. ‘What’s wrong? Can I get you something?’

Turmeric, coriander, methi.

Avinash’s hand was still stroking her forehead. Her nails dug into her palms as she tried to stop herself from swatting his hand away like a fly, a fly on a rotting ripe banana. Flies, yes, flies buzzing around her head.

Turmeric, coriander, methi.
Her mother in the kitchen…
Her father reading the newspaper…
Old Sushila chopping the fish…
Turmeric, dhoney, methi…
Holud, dhoney, methi…

This piece has been excerpted with permission from Bloomsbury India.

To buy the book, which you must, click here: Don’t Let Him Know

Sandip Roy is Senior Editor at the popular news portal Firstpost.com and blogs for the Huffington Post. He has been a longtime commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, the most listened-to radio programme in the US, and has a weekly radio postcard for public radio in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also an editor with New America Media. Sandip has won several awards for journalism and contributed to various anthologies including Storywallah!, Contours of the Heart, Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, Out! Stories from the New Queer India, New California Writing 2011 and The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India. Sandip lives in Kolkata.