A couple used food as a leitmotif to stitch, in a coffee table book, 40 years of travelling together around the world.
Movable Feasts, by Kunal and Susmita Basu, was launched at Calcutta Club earlier this month. The author couple discussed the book with Sayan Mukherji of the club.
The Basus have borrowed the name of the book from A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of Paris in the 1920s.
“There is a para (in Hemingway’s book) which says if you have been lucky enough to have lived in Paris... then wherever you go, it stays with you. For Paris is a moveable feast,” Kunal Basu said at Calcutta Club.
Mukherji said the book, four years in the making, encapsulated a journey of 40 years.
The Basus recounted the origins of the book.
“It started four years back…. We were thinking back with respect to all our travels. We said look, what is going to happen when we are dead. All our memories, the things we have lived, experienced, desired and felt, they will be gone. Only our daughter will have some memory of it. But it will be lost to the world,” said Kunal.
Susmita suggested the idea of a book. “I suggested that we write a book about our experiences,” she said.
“How do you stitch it all together… We thought, let's use food as a leitmotif, let's use cuisine as an organising principle,” said Kunal.
