"Bengali Harlem: Author documents a lost history of immigration in America"

In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India. It will be a journey steeped in a history that has remained unknown until the publication last month of a revelatory book by Vivek Bald.
And it will be a journey of contemplation as Shaik, 60, meets for the first time ancestors with whom she has little in common.