As described in Kipling's "City of Awful Night," Jawaharlal Nehru's "Nightmare Experience," "Heroine of a Hundred Thousand Loves," and other works, Kolkata incites strong emotions in practically everyone who encounters it. Calcutta throbs with a life and a vitality all its own, attracting people from all walks of life to engage with it despite having "probably the filthiest climate on earth," described by Mark Twain as "Enough to Make a Doorknob Mushy," and despite the doomsday predictions that it would be a "dying city." In this book, individuals with a strong bond to Calcutta offer essays, stories, poems, and memories. From the urban life miniatures of Henry Meredith Parker in the early nineteenth century to Ulrike Draesner's overblown photographs at the turn of the new millennium, from Tagore?s elegiac reminiscences of his childhood home to Sandipan Chattopadhyay?s hallucinogenic depictions of nights spent on the footpath, Memory?s Gold celebrates the coexistence of the sacrosanct and the blasphemous, so characteristic of Calcutta itself.