In monsoon-soaked Kolkata, a veteran reporter turns in his press card and comes home to a quiet apartment, a faithful kettle, and a carton he has avoided for decades-labeled in block letters: 1984-1993. When the tape gives way, two lives spill out. One belongs to the public: clippings, paste-ups, dispatches filed at speed as the country lurches through as-sassination and curfew, poison gas and panic wards, bombs and broken streets, riots and relief camps, reforms and queues. The other belongs to one person: aerogrammes and emails exchanged with Anita-friend, scholar, emigrant-whose letters arrive carrying recipes, films, literature, and the kind of care that deadlines never print.

The Box and the Byline is built on an unforgettable design-one clip, one letter, alternating like breath-and the effect is electric. The news reports give you the hard edge of chronology: datelines, names, what can be verified. The correspondence gives you what history rarely archives: the aftertaste of a day's violence, the loneliness of returning from a story, the domestic rituals that keep grief from taking the whole room.

At its heart is a question as intimate as it is urgent: what does it cost to witness-and what does it mean to keep witnessing anyway? "Witness is a kind of love," Roy writes, and these pages prove it: unsent lines beside headline truths, a nation's fractures beside two stubbornly living voices-both refusing to be erased.

"Good Morning...... finished reading The Box and The Byline yester night! Your flair for the epistolary style has worked its magic again....the structure of the chapters with the "what we know/pretend to know/do not know" sharpens the pain of incomprehension and loss.... What we should think about flatlines under what we are led to think about by mainstream history and politics. The way you have made contemporary Indian disaster timelines to resonate through Anita and Sanjay's personal spheres is intriguing to say the least...

You have a world of literature inside you, so don't box it up in this box, this shouldn't be your last piece..... Your control over language and the visuals they evoke is just so superlative!!!!"  ~~ Suchandra Roychowdhury, Ex Senior IB Faculty, Author of The Shotgun Wedding

** NB: Published under SHERNI - an imprint of Rhito Prakashan