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The House He Left Behind: A Stranger's Search for Home
by Aseem Gupta
- Category: Fiction
- Language: English
- Reading time: about 14 min
About this book
He was four when his mother walked out through the gate of a children's home in Pune and did not look back. He watched that gate for a long, long time.
Then two strangers from California chose him. Arin became Evan Whitmore, with a mother and father in Sacramento, a sister named Sophie, and a cheap clock from India that ran seven minutes fast. For a while it looked as though the waiting had worked. Then his father died, and at thirteen Evan was driven away from another house, to Harbor House, a residential home in the Bay Area.
There he found Malik: a best friend, a bench, and one ridiculous dream about building something. Not a kind of something. A huge one. Evan lost Malik. He kept building anyway, and named his company Bench. By thirty his face was on magazine covers. Some called him a workaholic. That word was correct.
His assistant sends him on a tour of Europe to rest. It does not work. So he goes to India, and this time he books it himself. India greets him with absolutely no interest in the fact that he is a billionaire. This is, frankly, rude. By the next day his wallet is gone on a Mumbai local train. A delivery boy named Sunny buys him a vada pav and says, as a joke, "Welcome home, boss." And in the rain above Munnar, a tea worker named Badri, who lives with his family in a single room, offers a soaked, lost stranger a place to stay.
"You don't have room," Evan says.
"We have tea," says Badri.
Badri's wife, Meera, gives Evan about three seconds of suspicion and then a plate. Their children, Tara and Kiran, adopt him before he has the opportunity to object. Two nights become weeks, and a man who has been called a visionary and a genius is given the first title he never earned, bought or survived: Uncle Evan.
The House He Left Behind is a warm, funny and moving novel about adoption and abandonment, grief and friendship, overwork and loneliness, and the people who make room for us. It moves from Pune to Sacramento, the Bay Area, Mumbai and the tea hill
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