In a boxy apartment building in an American university town, Romola Mitra, a newly arrived young bride, anxiously awaits her first letter from home in India. When she accidentally opens the wrong letter, it changes her life. Decades later, her son Amit finds that letter and thinks he has discovered his mother’s secret. But secrets have their own secrets sometimes, and a way of following their keepers.
Amit does not know that Avinash, his dependable and devoted father, lurks on gay Internet groups at times, unable to set aside his lifelong attraction to men. Avinash has no idea that his dutiful wife had once romanced a dashing Bengali filmstar, whose memory she keeps tucked away in a diary amongst her silk saris.
Growing up in Calcutta, in a house bustling with feisty grandmothers, Amit has been shielded from his parents’ secrets. A successful computer engineer, he settles in San Francisco, torn between his new life and his duties towards the one he has left behind.
Moving from adolescent rooftop games to adult encounters in gay bars, from hair salons in Calcutta to McDonald’s drivethrus in California, Don’t Let Him Know is an unforgettable story about family, the struggle between having what we want and doing what we feel we must and the sacrifices we make for those we love. Tender, powerful, and beautifully told, Don’t Let Him Know marks the arrival of a brave new voice.
Praise for Don’t Let Him Know
‘With a tender yet exacting gaze, Sandip Roy creates a mesmerizing tableau of family life in an era of transformation, migration, and upheaval’
Tahmima Anam
‘Don’t Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret. Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read’
Abraham Verghese
‘Sandip Roy's compelling characters strive to negotiate the distances between continents, generations and sexualities; through a dazzling mosaic of narrative snapshots Roy captures the arcs of entire lifetimes’
Manil Suri
‘Sandip Roy finds the hidden pockets within ordinary moments…a moving portrait of the loves and longings of a family split: between India and America, between past and present, and between duty and dreams’
Celeste Ng
‘Sandip Roy’s moving Don’t Let Him Know … will touch the hearts of readers with its fine attention to detail, its psychological insight, and its ability to fully imagine the complex responses of the human heart’
Chitra Divakaruni
‘In this beautiful debut, Sandip Roy explores the fine line between knowing too little and knowing too much, and between understanding too little and understanding too much. Spanning decades and traveling between continents, the novel is an inquiry about how our secrets shape us, and how, in turn, we redefine ourselves constantly to avoid being trapped by the secrets’
Yiyun Li
‘This magnificent novel, through its many viewpoints and stories, builds a composite portrait of three unforgettable characters and of the times they live in – times that shape their destinies in very different ways’
Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy and The Hungry Ghosts
About the Author
Sandip Roy is Senior Editor at the popular news portal Firstpost.com, blogs for the Huffington Post and is an Associate Editor with New America Media. He has been a longtime commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, one of the most listened-to radio programmes in the US, and has a weekly radio postcard for public radio on KALW 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has contributed to various anthologies including New California Writing 2011, Story-wallah!, Contours of the Heart, Out! Stories from the New Queer India, Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India and The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India. He currently lives in Kolkata.
