Different Genres, One Thread
Madhumita Chakraborty
The House And Other Stories/There’s A Carnival Today/On The Road To Tarascon by Amit Dasgupta Yoda Press, New Delhi/Speaking Tiger, New Delhi/Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2018, 128 pp., 295
June 2018, volume 42, No 6

Two novels, one short story collection. Different themes. With one joining thread, West Bengal, the State which is the setting for all three works. While Amit Dasgupta’s The House and Other Stories and Arnab Nandy’s On the Road to Tarascon are set in Kolkata, a familiar locale in many stories and novels, Indra Bahadur Rai’s novel, (translated by Manjushree Thapa) There’s a Carnival Today, considered a classic of Nepali literature, is set in Darjeeling, with its mystical mountains and tea gardens. In all these works, the protagonists are in search of an identity, a new life, and the cityscape plays a crucial role in this journey that they undertake.

The first collection consists of three short stories, with Kolkata at the centre. In fact, Dasgupta tells us that ‘as all Bengalis will tell you, even when the city stands quietly in the corner, not saying aword, her presence may be deeply felt by those close to her’, and that ‘Calcutta is a city where it is difficult to keep secrets’.

We note here the use of ‘Calcutta’ as opposed to ‘Kolkata’, which is the modern-day usage. I would guess that the writer perhaps empathizes more with the associations that the old usage brings to the mind—an old-world cosmopolitan city, a melting pot of cultures, a city that still retains vestiges of the days when it was the colonial capital. At the centre of The House and Other Stories are ordinary everyday people living in this city and their relationship to the past. These stories take us into the minds of these people who breathe in its sights and sounds on a daily basis. From a house that takes on a haunted quality after a number of tragic incidents and almost possesses the protagonist in the first story to the sudden discovery of a diary that changes the direction of the life of a septuagenarian widower to the final title story, there is also another link among all the stories. In the first story, the protagonist is excited when he hears the story of Mohua Emily Dey, who lived in a house called Dey Mansion with her father, Parimal Albert Dey. Mohua had died more than a century ago, and the house has been said to be haunted ever since, with locals reporting unnatural happenings, and no one daring to enter. The protagonist breaks this taboo; he enters the house, hears Mohua’s story and his life is never the same again. It seems that he is under the spell of Mohua, both the real opium, and the opium that is associated with the house and its inhabitants.

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