I in the Sky

by Neel Kamal Puri

English 304 pages 1 edition

Bubbly is dead. Her body has risen to the surface of Sukhna Lake, but from somewhere above Chandigarh, swaddled in cloud and memory, she continues to look down: at the city that was born with her, at the family that made and unmade her, and at the long afterlife of love, ambition, hurt and history. Born in a canvas tent in the early years of Chandigarh’s making, Bubbly grows up alongside a city imagined as a clean slate—modern, rational, and free of the past. But neither cities nor families are ever built on empty ground, and around her gather Billo and Randy, Barfi Ram and his descendants, protestors and officials, migrants and misfits, the displaced and the dreaming; lives caught in the sweep of nation-building, memory, marriage, gender and inheritance. Witty, digressive, sharp-eyed and tender, I in the Sky is at once a family chronicle and a ghost story—asking us what survives planning and what resists erasure, and what the dead can see that the living cannot. More than anything else, it’s an irreverent biography of Chandigarh itself.