Readers of short fiction will be happy to welcome this new anthology. I enjoyed reading the stories as they are well selected and translated. Writers range from the end of the nineteenth (Rajsekhar Basu, 1880) to the middle of the nineteenth century (Suchitra Bhattacharya, 1950) and include some of the best-known artists of the Bangla language. Let me begin by quoting from the two writers I have just mentioned; Chakravarti translates Rajsekhar Basu’s ‘Anandibai’ with utmost ease: Trikramdas Karorhi was a little over fifty with a marital career graph that was strange—to say the least. Like most other men he had had one wife till only two years ago. She had died, suddenly, leaving him inconsolable and encumbered, besides, with the responsibility of half a dozen children. Unable to bear the burden of her loss, he had married Anandibai three months after the tragic event and then two others in rapid succession. He had, however, kept the fact of his last two marital ventures carefully hidden from friends, relatives and Anandi. (p. 3)
December 2006, volume 30, No 12