Anjana Basu taught English literature briefly at Kolkatta University. She also writes and poetry, and features for local newspapers and magazines. Her book of short stories was published by Oreint Longman India and one of her stories was broadcast by the BBC. Her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In the US she has been published by the Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, the Blue Moon Review and Recursive Angelto name a few.
A richly textured tale of three generations of women who live under the spell of an ancestral curse, Curses in Ivorydraws you into the lives of Hansabati, Regina, Brishti who wrote poetry, Queenie Mashi and her veiled life, and Sreya, whose destiny it becomes to uncover the truth. Hansabati, who lives in purdah overshadowed by the memory of her beautiful mother-in-law, thinks she has triumphed over the curse when she bears a son, only to find it alive and well, Her daughter, Regina, lives through her marriage haunted and tormented by the macabre death of her sister-in-law. And Sreya, the third generation and narrator of the story, is blighted by her father's neglect and her mother's rage until she finally discovers the true meaning of the curse when she opens an old invory casket. What had seemed a permanent could hanging over the family, a fact of life like the weather or fate itself, suddenly has cause and a history, and in knowing these there is for Sreya a kind of liberation. Curses in Ivory may centre around a curse, but it is also a story of mothers and daughters, pujas and pearls, arranged marriages and office romances- a subtle, multi-layered tale told in a writing style as remarkable as its subject, at once wry, delicate and full of passion.
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