These short stories by Sandipan Chattopadhyay (1933-2005) make stark statements about urban middle-class existence in Kolkata, and almost unwittingly about postmodernist vernacular fiction. Sandipan writes, ‘The pen I use drips ink uncontrollably. I hate everything else that drips uncontrollably, human sentimentality, for instance.’
Coursing through familiar lanes and by lanes, across monuments, markets, residential paras, roadside joints and eateries of a populous city, persons like Ranjan and Bijon, Rajmohan and Banabehari, women like Ruby, Shelly or Maya, lose themselves in sheer anonymity. ‘Who am I, or what? Nothing. I haven’t been given a name. I named myself.’