The Four Dimensions Plus One – Reading Basudhara Roy’s Stitching a Home

Anurima Chanda reviews Basudhara Roy’s poetry collection – Stitching a Home (Red River, 2021), and observes how the collection leaves no inch unstitched in an individual’s negotiations with one’s home, both literally and figuratively. 

At a time when everyone was rediscovering new meanings of the idea of “home” amidst successive lockdowns in a pandemic inflicted society, Basudhara Roy’s second collection of poems entitled Stitching a Home (published by Red River) hit the stands in April 2021. Encased in a paper cover splashed with hopeful yellow adorned with flower motifs, which can be easily mistaken as embroidered fabric, the collection seemed to swoop in a messianic way to instill courage and show us that “a home with hope and fortitude, must be stitched every day” (in the poet’s own words of dedication to her mother). 

Spread out in three parts and fifty-three poems, the collection leaves no inch unstitched in an individual’s negotiations with one’s home, both literally and figuratively.