Robi Sen has spent fourteen years building a life in Iowa City that was never quite meant to be permanent - an arranged marriage carried over from Calcutta, a tenured post teaching English literature, a careful collection of habits meant to make a borrowed country feel like home. Then, one winter evening, his wife Nondita leaves him for good.
Adrift in his own apartment, Robi falls into an unlikely romance with Carol, a warm, curious American woman who loves the idea of India more than she will ever love the man in front of her. Their tenderness is real, and so is the distance neither of them can close.
Then a single classroom assignment upends everything: a novel about a young Muslim man's radicalization draws a complaint, and two federal agents arrive to investigate Professor Sen for "teaching terrorist literature." Suspended and abruptly, unwillingly visible, Robi retreats to Delhi, where his parents gently arrange meetings with eligible Bengali women - each one a mirror held up to a self he left behind years ago.
Moving through Iowa City, Delhi, and Calcutta in three unflinching parts - Leaving Home, Going Home, Coming Home - Brown Man in White Light is a richly interior, sensuously written novel about exile, suspicion, and the slow relearning of one's own language. Caught between the woman who first showed him desire in English and the one who might finally answer him in Bengali, Robi must decide what he is willing to call home.
For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri, Amit Chaudhuri, and Mohsin Hamid - a novel about race, language, and the architecture of love across a border that never quite closes.
