As the title of this slim novel makes it clear, The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay is about a single woman protagonist who, as a middle-aged Bengali housewife in Kolkata, whiles away her time in the boring routine activities in her household often thinking that ‘life shouldn’t be like a straight line without any exciting deviations’. Set in 2016, one day Pauloma discovers three earthen storage vessels that were used to store grains for generations and were now lying idle in the storeroom of their ancient house. As she goes nearer, she feels as if an invisible hand had pulled her back downwards, and in a fit of delusion she is transported into different ages. The rules of time and space become suspended and almost obliterate the distinction between imagination and reality.
Thus begin the stories of three radically different women with whom Pauloma somehow identifies herself. In the next four chapters spanning from 1925 to 1943, she is whisked off to Hanover, Dachau and Auschwitz in Germany where she becomes Aurora Miller. Nazism had divided the people into two factions: German patriots and Jew-loving traitors. The political circumstances of Germany had created a wall between Aurora and her husband Henry, and their ideological differences had surpassed their affection for each other only to result in Aurora’s suicide in the end.