About the Book: Raw Umber : A Memoir
The autobiographical essays in Raw Umber are as much about the steady pulse of
Sara Rais childhood in the 1960s, as they are about the nature of remembering,
and the role that memory plays in shaping a writers sensibility. It is the
unconscious jottings of the mind, and the cadences that enter the ears, the
inner life that develops during years of unhurried living in places like
Allahabad and Banaras that prepare the ground for the fiction writer. With the
figure of her grandfather Premchand looming over her childhood, and with others
in her family—grandmother, parents, aunts, uncles and