Not Just Another Story: a Novel

When the rags-to-riches hit movie Slumdog Millionaire swept the Oscars in 2009, a Kolkata journalist was tasked with tracking downakshmi, a young girl from Sonagachi who had been part of an award-winning documentary about sex workers and their children. When the journalist finally tracked down the elusiveakshmi, she was surprised to see how much the young girl had changed.akshmi, now called Anjali, was a high-class escort—astute, beautiful and ambitious, she had found peace with her place in the world. As the journalist slowly got to knowakshmi, she found out more about her mother and grandmother and the circumstances that had brought them into the brothels of Kolkata’s red-light district. The poignant chronicle of three generations of sex workers—Saraju, Malati andakshmi— takes us from a village in Bangladesh to a refugee camp in India in the years before the Bangladesh War to the murky alleys of Sonagachi to the posh Saltake area in Kolkata. At the heart of this compelling narrative isakshmi’s tenacious struggle toift herself out of the squalor and unpredictability of Sonagachi’s brothels to find power and stability in herife.