See You in Ezra Street captures the dramatic uncertainty of a young woman striking up new roots, dealing with her love affair, while absorbing the dramatic lessons from her grandfather’s life in colonial India. Born and raised in Sweden, the introverted life of Tanushree Roy Choudhury, a young music scholar with Indian roots, takes a dramatic turn when she suddenly gets strong hallucinations about her family’s past and starts searching for answers. Answers which her parents had always left unknown. Her research takes her from Berlin to London, where she again meets Joshua Salisbury, a shy and secretive physicist she had not only met once before, but whose eyes she was never able to forget. When by chance the two of them find out that their grandfathers – despite their different religious and cultural backgrounds – had been close friends and classmates in Calcutta in the early 1900s, they continue Tanushree’s search together. The revealing and candid diary entries, photographs and correspondence that Joshua’s family has kept teaches them about differences in values embracing religion, nationality, obedience to elders and romantic rivals in the lives of their grandfathers Isiah Cohen and Debendranath Roy Choudhury. They soon see themselves confronted with not only a hidden and to them unknown love affair, but also with the heavy impacts of war-split India on their close ancestors’ lives – deaths in the family and losing one’s home – startling events which even after seven decades have an impact on the present.
Ranjita Dutta Roy is a Theoretical Synaptic Neurobiologist, living in Gothenburg. Her research work has taken her to different places around the world, but she was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has her roots in India. She comes from a family who suffered during the Partition of India in 1947, and this has given inspiration to ‘See You in Ezra Street’. On her free time she enjoys singing and playing the violin.