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Bhaswati Ghosh, Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen, Copper Coin Publishing, 2024. 102 pgs.

Nostalgia is humanity’s Janus-faced companion—simultaneously looking back and forward, with someone or something perpetually tugging at us from behind. Yielding to it is not a mere indulgence but, at times, a necessity—offering the wisdom to understand who we are, shaped by the “roots” and “routes” that define our journeys. In a world increasingly fraught with conflict and displacement, it is only natural that narratives exploring these two R’s—roots and routes—should continue to emerge. For the people of the Indian subcontinent, whose shared and traumatic histories of Partition and the Bangladesh Liberation War remain deeply embedded in cultural memory, nostalgia serves as both a fertile and essential motif in the collective psyche and fiction. Stories born from survival and resettlement must be preserved and passed down to new generations of readers and listeners, lest they be erased by the official historiography of the nation. Since time immemorial, the world has progressed and endured through storytelling—the foundational thread of every community, woven through acts of telling and retelling across generations.

Bhaswati Ghosh’s debut poetry collection, Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen, encapsulates all of this—and more. Having grown up in New Delhi and now residing in Canada, Ghosh traverses and inhabits multiple worlds—the cities of her childhood and adulthood, the towns she has visited in her travels, and the villages she has never set foot in but knows intimately through the vivid recollections of her grandmother’s storytelling. In her poetry, time and space coalesce, overlap, and blur, mirroring the way memory itself operates—fluid, unpredictable, and untethered to rules or chronology. The past and the imagined intertwine, shaping a landscape where nostalgia is not merely a longing for what was, but for what could have been.

The collection is divided into multiple sections, yet the quiet river that runs through them all, binding them together, is an aching longing for places never seen—for landscapes the poetic voice has never physically inhabited but carries within. They say one never visits the same place twice, for the mind’s eye is constantly reshaping memory, altering the way we perceive familiar spaces. In Ghosh’s poetry, places are not just geographical locations but sensuous, evocative spaces—worlds alive with sight, sound, and the echoes of stories retold from memory. Here, personal history, anecdotes, and laments swirl and jostle, shaping a terrain of longing and remembrance. This act of recollection is as much about recording as it is about preservation—an attempt to capture what might otherwise fade. Take, for instance, the closing lines of “First Flush”—“The heart is but a travelling historian.”

One must also recognise the performative aspect of this act of preservation—an urgent race against the chariots of time to ensure these stories do not slip into oblivion. Memory is fragile, and remembrance is both an act of defiance and devotion. Ghosh captures this poignancy in her poem “Ageing Wine”, where she writes—

Fine wine,
 they call it. We call it nostalgia.
We call it love.

As the world shrinks at the speed of light and the promise of dissolving borders fades into illusion, a starkly different reality confronts us. The rise of totalitarian forces and identity politics, where individuals are confined to rigid markers of religion and ethnicity, makes it clear that nostalgia cannot be dismissed as mere indulgence or idle longing. Instead, it becomes an act of cultural preservation—a means of creating a museum of artefacts and lost traditions, from the sartorial to the culinary, safeguarding the fragments of what might otherwise be erased. Bhaswati Ghosh, in her debut novel Victory Colony, 1950, explored the trauma of displacement. For the displaced, the struggle was not only about survival but also about rebuilding a sense of community and belonging. In the makeshift kitchens of refugee camps, cooking became an act of resistance, a way of holding onto the vestiges of a homeland that no longer existed. This act of culinary and cultural remembrance is a recurring motif in Ghosh’s work, as seen in her poetry. In Displaced Persons’ Colony, she poignantly writes—

That afternoon, I learned hunger on
a hot summer day can turn your brother
into a fast-track cook in a semi-constructed kitchen.
That a meal of steaming rice and hot potatoes
can surpass any other in the world.

When one writes from memory and about memory, there is always the risk of exposing the gap—the distance between intention and execution. Yet, in reading Ghosh’s poetry, one is overwhelmed not by absence, but by sensuous presence—as if the poems were composed on the threshold of a courtyard, at the kitchen door, or wrapped in the comfort of a quilt beneath the winter sun. Whether in the poem “Cumin” or “Arabian Jasmine”, Ghosh’s world is one of scent and sound, immediate and immersive. The sizzling of cumin seeds in simmering oil, the fragrance of jasmine wrapping the evening in its embrace—these images do not merely evoke memory, they summon it into being. Her poetry is steeped in the textures of the everyday, capturing the weight of separation and longing with sharp, unembellished precision. The poems strike with the force of an unexpected taste or scent—an explosion of sensory recall. Ghosh has an unerring eye and ear for the everyday, for the trivial and the transient, the minute and the seasonal. Each line is carefully measured, yet carries a weight that extends beyond poetic discipline and rigour, anchoring itself in something more visceral, more enduring. Grandmothers and dwelling places appear and disappear, whispering to us and about us—of lost time, vanished homelands, forgotten geographies and postal codes, and people slowly fading into the recesses of memory. Take, for instance, the poem “Temporary and Permanent”—

My grandmother gave us her village address
noted with peripheral markers. Spatial jigsaws.
Sprawling fruit orchards, a pond ‘as big as a river.’
the temple my brother found
pieces of when he visited
the village years after
Grandma died
pining for it.

But is melancholia the defining mood of this collection? Not quite. Ghosh’s poems resist the temptation of nostalgia as mere lamentation, instead offering a precise, almost microscopic examination of cities and people—mapping the shifting moods and textures of places scattered across the globe. Delhi pulses with chaotic energy, its streets defined by the relentless hustle of survival. Mexico City and Buenos Aires, in contrast, exude a laid-back charm, as if suspended in a perpetual siesta. These physical spaces dominate much of the collection—not simply as backdrops, but as repositories of memory, inseparable from what has been lost, yearned for, or carried within. At its core, this exploration reflects a deep longing to experience, to belong, to gather fragments of places and people and carry them forward. Yet, woven subtly into the background is the quiet, unsettling realisation that such permanence may remain just beyond reach—that no place, no person, no past can ever be held entirely intact.

If these poems carry the personal lament of lost cities and severed relationships, they also resonate with the political, engaging with themes that hold urgent and universal significance in the present day. Poems such as “Things I Imagine Telling My Niece” and “Wrapping Love” challenge the dominant hegemonic ideology of the Right Wing, advocating instead for personal choice and agency—the freedom to decide what one wears, eats, reads, and speaks about. These works are as much about the act of seeking as they are about the ways in which knowledge is preserved and passed on. Language and dialects, recalled from memory, are carefully stowed away, as if sealed in glass jars—pickled for later consumption, safeguarded for posterity. In this poetic landscape, words are both inheritance and resistance, held close to counter the erasure imposed by political forces that dictate not just history, but the very language of belonging.

Good literature reveals a network of connections—a poem or novel transcends linguistic and cultural boundaries, forging an unspoken camaraderie between writers who share common concerns, histories, and anxieties. Reading through Ghosh’s collection, one is struck by this very quality—her work resonates with the voices of other poets and novelists who have navigated similar predicaments of displacement, memory, and identity. In “Fading Colour”, when Ghosh reflects on letters and their fading hues, one cannot help but recall Agha Shahid Ali’s poignant lament in “The Half-Inch Himalayas”—”Kashmir shrinks in my mailbox.” Similarly, in “Pickling Language”, Ghosh grapples with the transformation of language and history, a concern reminiscent of Rushdie’s concept of “chutnification”—the dynamic process of linguistic and cultural blending that reshapes personal and collective narratives. Through these intertextual echoes, Ghosh’s poetry joins a larger literary conversation, reminding us that exile, nostalgia, and the act of preserving language are concerns shared across borders and generations.

The poems in this collection feel lived with—carefully polished, chipped away at, and then presented with the utmost precision and care. There is seldom a sense of the “spontaneous overflow”; rather, each poem resembles a child nurtured with patience, given the time and attention it deserves—and then some. This is not a collection to be rushed through in a handful of reading sessions. It demands reflection, invites contemplation, and encourages meditation, particularly for those who have inherited the trauma of separation, riots, and communal fragmentation. But it also speaks to those who find themselves estranged from their homeland, whether through exile—voluntary or forced. For them, nostalgia is both a closest confidant and an adversary—their most intimate companion, yet the enemy who knows them best.

How to cite: Aich, Sayan. “This is How Places Heave: Memory and Longing in Bhaswati Ghosh’s Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Feb. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/02/13/never-seen.

Sayan Aich Bhowmik is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Shirakole College, Kolkata. He is the co-editor of Plato’s Caves Online, a semi-academic space on poetry/culture and politics.