Chitra Demands to Go Home

by Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay

Chitra Demands to Go Home tells the story of Chitra, a 75-year-old Bengali woman who feels trapped in an assisted living facility and just wants to go home.

Chitra spent her life taking care of her children and her husband in a foreign country and managing a grand house in Kolkata, India. Now, in her mid-seventies, widowed, and with her children living their own lives, Chitra plans to travel the world and enjoy the hospitality granted to respected family elders.

However, her plans are upended when she suffers a stroke and her younger son has a heart attack. Chitra then finds herself among American strangers in the institutional blandness of Tranquil Town, an assisted living facility in Columbus, Ohio. As her temporary stay stretches longer and longer, Chitra does everything she can to avoid making friends and convince her sons to take her home.

Describing both the bitter and the sweet, Chitra Demands to Go Home explores mother-son relationships, cross-cultural conversations, and the tribulations of getting older as Chitra plots her triumphant return to her home in Kolkata.

192 pages, Paperback

Expected publication May 12, 2026

Reviews

[Michael Fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chitra Demands to Go Home is both tongue-in-cheek funny and poignant. And while Chitra is a particular woman with no end of baggage, she represents all of us boomers as we age and face the reality of losing agency in our 21st century lives. In relatively few pages Mukhopadhyay skillfully touches on many salient aspects of life, loss, 3rd-culture kids, blended families and caring for aging family members. Chitra's story is a clever and succinct rendering of life in our times. I suspect few can read this story without seeing aspects of themselves, their children or their parents. And in the end, Chitra's story, stripped of its cultural context remains a human story and is universal.