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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Hemangi Sawant’s Denver to Mumbai follows Sawant after thirteen years in America, when she leaves a comfortable life near Denver with her husband, Neeraj, and their ten-year-old son, Ronak, to return to Mumbai. The decision begins with grief after a call from her sister Shyamal tells her that her father has died. Years later, that loss still presses on Sawant as she thinks about her mother, Ronak’s grandparents, Indian languages, and the culture her son has mostly met during summer visits. Once Ronak’s Mumbai school admission is secured, Sawant and Ronak fly ahead while Neeraj remains in America to finish the practical side of leaving. Mumbai greets them with family love, but the city Sawant remembers has become faster, larger, and harder to read. The memoir follows one family’s attempt to make India home again.
Hemangi Sawant’s Denver to Mumbai is a wonderfully candid memoir, and Sawant textures the experience with so much color and love that it is easy to be fully immersed. It's clear that Sawant's experiences are impacted as much by the small things as by the large, and she proves this when she lets one household task expose a whole city’s rhythm. I love the custom-furniture stories, and the confusion with the carpenter is hilarious. In this, Sawant leans into issues of communication, deadlines, and the patience demanded by Mumbai living. This extends to a lecture about a wheeled book bag and the goddess Vidya, and the half-in, half-out feeling of being both local and foreign at once. Still, Sawant also gives readers the joy she came seeking, with Ronak witnessing the Ganesh Festival at the Konkan ancestral home, and later carrying pieces of India into his Juhu high-school years. Well written and full of heart, readers who enjoy memoirs about a return to one's roots after years abroad will adore this.
