Description
When celebrity journalist and writer Bhawana Somaaya’s therapist once asked her what
her biggest fear in life was, she unthinkingly said, ‘It’s not having a roof over my head.’
Until then, she had never acknowledged the intergenerational trauma-informed instinct
of displacement and placelessness. She was yet to unpack its haunting grip on her
flights, fights and freezes.
Farewell Karachi is the story of a family planting its roots anew in a country at the cusp of
a violent Partition. Spanning over a hundred years and five generations, the narrative
draws on an intimate portrait of a large family that grew up under the unspoken spectre
of Partition. Told in an astonishingly mosaic and archaeological tone, this is the saga of
a displaced Gujarati family from Karachi that moved to Kutch and subsequently to
erstwhile Bombay in India to rebuild a life for themselves.
In telling this moving tale, the book also seeks to make sense of and heal from the
foundational wound of two South Asian infant nation-states, exploring how that wound
shaped the imminent futures of the peoples partitioned along the Radcliffe Line. In here
are dreams, some shattered, some salvaged; in here are customs, heartbreaks and
carefully preserved recipes. At the heart of this memoir are the stories behind the nests
we weave.
Author Biography
Bhawana Somaaya has been a film critic for more than 40 years and has written for a
galaxy of Indian publications. She is the former editor of Screen and has authored
several books on cinema, including biographies of Hema Malini and Amitabh
Bachchan. Several of her books are taught to students of cinema in India. She has
served on the advisory panel of the Indian Central Board of Film Certification and the
governing council of Film and Television Institute of India.
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