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Don’t Let Him Know: Author, Sandip Roy reads from his debut novel

Join us as one of our beloved Trikone member celebrates his first debutant novel with San Francisco Bay Area!

Sandip Roy is Senior Editor at the popular news portal Firstpost.com and blogs for the Huffington Post. He has been a longtime commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and has a weekly radio postcard for public radio in the San Francisco Bay Area called, Sandip Roy’s Dispatches from Kolkata. He is also an editor with New America Media. Sandip has won several awards for journalism and contributed to various anthologies including Storywallah!, Contours of the Heart, Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, Out! Stories from the New Queer India, New California Writing 2011 and The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India. Sandip lives in Kolkata.

Sandip was the editor of Trikone Magazine for 52 issues!

Date: Thursday, February 12, 2015
Time: 5 PM – 7 PM PST
Venue: Stephens Hall, 10 (ISAS Conf. Room), UC Berkeley

About the book

In a boxy apartment building in an American university town, Romola Mitra, a newly arrived young bride, anxiously awaits her first letter from home in India. When she accidentally opens the wrong letter, it changes her life. Decades later, her son Amit finds that letter and thinks he has discovered his mother’s secret. But secrets have their own secrets sometimes, and a way of following their keepers.

Amit does not know that Avinash, his dependable and devoted father, lurks on gay Internet groups at times, unable to set aside his lifelong attraction to men. Avinash has no idea that his dutiful wife had once romanced a dashing Bengali filmstar, whose memory she keeps tucked away in a diary amongst her silk saris.

Growing up in Calcutta, in a house bustling with feisty grandmothers, Amit has been shielded from his parents’ secrets. A successful computer engineer, he settles in San Francisco, torn between his new life and his duties towards the one he has left behind.

Moving from adolescent rooftop games to adult encounters in gay bars, from hair salons in Calcutta to McDonald’s drive-thrus in California, Don’t Let Him Know is an unforgettable story about family, the struggle between having what we want and doing what we feel we must – and the sacrifices we make for those we love. Tender, powerful, and beautifully told, Don’t Let Him Know marks the arrival of a brave new voice.

Speaker: Sandip Roy, Author and Journalist
Moderator: Raka Ray, Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asia Studies, and Chair of the Department of Sociology
Sponsor: Institute for South Asia Studies