When the daughterly impulse strikes her, she is solicitous to her father.

As he takes off on frequent package tours to various European countries, she wants him to move in with her.

But eventually she discovers that her father has found a private world of his own with a spirited Bengali widow.

He has come to a point where he thinks he can live without the cloying comforts of a family fussing over him. 'The entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start,' her father muses.

In 'Heaven-Hell', the author gently dramatises the affections of a bored Bengali housewife for a much younger Bengali man longing for homemade Bengali delicacies to bring out the loneliness and the ache of longing in an alien land.

The fiction of cultural assimilation, however, comes apart when the young lover gets married to an American woman, stays with her for over two decades before divorcing her.

Cultural divides are not easy to bridge in trans-cultural marital unions. 'I was so horribly jealous of you back then, for knowing him, understanding him in a way I never could,' the American woman confesses to the Bengali woman.

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