The People Who Ate At Our Table

Ipsita's mother is gone, and someone has to clear out the house in Kolkata- the steel almirah, the year's supply of pickle jars, the drawer of expired warranty cards nobody ever throws away, polythene bags kept under the bed. It should be simple. Grief usually isn't.Tucked between old recipe cards, Ipsita finds a notebook. In it, in her mother's small handwriting, is a list of everyone who ever sat at their dining table- every guest, every accidental houseguest, every relative who stayed "just for lunch" and left four hours later. Few names Ipsita knows by heart. A few names she has never heard in her life.The house was always full of people. Her mother, it turns out, was fuller still- of stories she never once brought up over dinner.The People Who Ate at Our Table is about the particular kind of love that happens over rice and dal and second helpings, and the parts of our parents that stay hidden even at a table where everyone else's business gets discussed. It will make you want to call your mother. And if you can't anymore, it will make you wish, very badly, that you had asked her more questions while you still could.