My Kind of Girl Paperback - 2010

Excerpt

A bitingly cold night in December. Four passengers sat silently in the first-class waiting room of Tundla station. All four were covered from head to toe, concealed by their overcoats, but even in the dim light of that stark, dispassionate room, built and decorated in accordance with the Indian Railway’s precise specifications, it was obvious that they were very different individuals, thrown together from different corners of society. The one in the easy chair had an enormously – even indecently – powerful body, as though he were a giant beast, the kind that out- grows its clothes and shoes at sixteen, to the amazement of its parents. His face was large too, almost as big as a jackfruit, and longish, and on the broad expanse of his cheeks – perhaps because his pores were swollen from the cold – the seeds of next morning’s beard were already sprouting in blue dots. The second one was a nicely proportioned, pleasant looking man, dapper, well-groomed, immaculate in his western garb; complete with hat, cane and gloves.

Media reviews

. . . Mellow and seductive . . . Just as Chekhov's characters are caught between up-to-date Western ways and retrograde Slavic manners, in the same way these colonial Indians are torn between an English forthrightness and a thoroughly Bengali muted sensuality. —Edmund White

It's just got the right feel . . . . At once innocent and overwhelmingly passionate, in the manner of first love . . . A novel of delicate ideas and nuances. To capture them with the right touch of lightness couldn't have been easy, yet Sinha does just that. —Mint

A magical and totally entertaining volume—Sinha has caught Bose's dynamic and unfetted style admirably. —India Today

That My Kind of Girl—a classic modernist tale of four passengers stranded in a railway-station waiting room at night, recounting stories of lost loves - is engrossing is thanks not only to Sinha's abilities, but to the quality of Bose's narrative, which, unlike his earlier, Calcutta-based masterpiece, Tithidore (1949), inhabits a lighter, more Maupassant-like manner instead. —Rosinka Chaudhari

. . . Bose's charming and chatty prose provides us with tales as entertaining as either of those of its predecessors. . . My Kind of Girl . . . is another fine addition to Archipelago's growing impressive list of world literature. —Rain Taxi

Masterful. . . . Superbly translated . . . Bose's remarkable talent of throwing his characters' voices and at the same time inhabiting their skin is on full display in this slim, moving book. —Hindustan Times

Wonderfully decadent. . . . [Written] with consummate mastery. . . . A gem of delight. . . . Bose stokes the embers of the story alive till the last page. —Indian Express