Shagufta KalimRimi B. Chatterjee has reason to smile. The author’s critically acclaimed book The City of Love has been shortlisted in the English fiction category for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award scheduled to be held this year. The award has been given since 1998 for the best of Indian writing in the categories of English fiction, English non-fiction and Indian language fiction translations.While The City of Love draws instant comparison with the Shangri La utopia, courtesy the name, Rimi’s work explores the pages of history, albeit somewhat forgotten, and recreates the fascinating and forbidding aura of 16th-century India in turmoil, in which four people set out on individual journeys of discovery.In the quest for enlightenment and bags of gold, one travels to the end of the known world, another meddles with the fates of kings, a third loses all he had, and a fourth finds the City of Love. "The story unfolds half a century after Vasco da Gama set foot in Calicut and perhaps changed the course of this land. It has the flourishing spice trade of 16th century India as the background and revolves around a Spanish spice trader, an Arab expatriate, a tribal girl, and a local boy set to become a priest," the author says."Much of the story centres around Chittagong and then moves to Gaur in Bengal and there are fleeting glimpses of Southeast Asia as well," she says. "The name draws inspiration from different philosophies, like the concept of Premnagar from the Baul culture and the mystical Ashqabad from the sufi heritage.""The work is an attempt to travel back in time and discover how certain people were ambushed by a dream and set out leaving their old identities behind and rediscovered themselves. It follows the footprints of those who left their homes on a journey and became something quite different from what they originally intended to. The journey itself was fulfilling as fellow travellers exchanged thoughts, debated over it and finally moved on," Rimi says. On a personal level, The City... holds special significance for Rimi."It was conceived and formulated at a time when I was diagnosed with cancer," she says.Published by Penguin in October 2007, The City of Love is Rimi’s second novel. She was noticed in the literary circle for Signal Red, a science fiction. She is ready to press forward the time machine with her third book Antisense, science fiction set in 2667, which she hopes will be ready by the year end.