Even as thousands of Bengali speakers make a living on the streets and sidewalks of the Eternal City, perhaps not far from Lahiri’s home on the Via Giulia, she turns inwards to contemplate her emerging Italian self, cartographer-cautious, one hesitant sentence at a time. Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted city features in this book only in occasional glimpses. The real work has now called upon another Bengali in Rome. ‘Here’s the letter, your letter, read it to find out what it says.’" “People live easy lives, passing time on some pretext or the other, until they’re called away to their real work. “Can anyone really live without a task such as this?" he asks himself at one point. For the rest of his life, the linguist is preoccupied with deciphering it. But when it arrives, it is coded in a jumble of scripts. It is the last letter he may receive before he returns to life in Calcutta, where there is “no room for anything purely personal". In Buddhadeva Bose’s Bengali short story The Love Letter, translated into English by Arunava Sinha, a linguist visiting Rome for the first time forgets Bernini and Michelangelo in his anxiety over a love letter from a woman in the US.
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