A Bengali's ode to sweets

Book review of Amit Chaudhuri's 'Sweet Shop'

Back in 2012, when novelist Amit Chaudhuri was a new citizen of Calcutta — both he and I prefer the older name, it seems — he sang paeans to Ujjala Chanachur, a legendary snacks shop in the south of the city, in a piece in The Telegraph. Though it sells different savouries, the shop specialises in chanachur — a savoury mixture of peanuts and besan papdi, usually consumed in the evening. Nearly half a decade later, Chaudhuri has travelled across the palate-spectrum and eulogised the ubiquitous sweet shops in Calcutta in his second book of poems. This is a sort