'Historians of Redundant Moments' review: Two sisters and their ghosts

The book, a winner of the 2016 Numinous Orisons Luminous Origin Literary Award, recreates the Left-ruled Calcutta of the eighties and nineties of the last century

In “Historying the Syllabic Landscape”, the opening poem of Nandini Dhar’s Historians of Redundant Moments (2017), the narrator tells us: “A home / is a city. A city is a home.” The second assertion is easy to comprehend: Many of us have found urban spaces to be hospitable and have grown over-familiar with their landscapes. The first claim, that a home is also a city, is a little more difficult to grasp. One could deduce that it refers to tenements being the smallest units — the alphabets — 

that compose a city’s narrative. But, one could also argue that the domestic