We couldn’t linger. ‘There’s so much more to see,’ urged Pradeep as he led me away. ‘Let’s meet Potty’, he said, with what I thought was a mischievous smile. The captivating aroma of really old books wafted around the corner…and there sat Solomon Pottesman, alias Potty surrounded by mountains of lovely antique books. ‘I am an incunabulist’, read the legend on the back of his chair.
The novel uses the classic archetypal Gothic trope of an abandoned and deteriorating establishment inhabited by a paranormal entity. Of particular interest is Khan’s portrayal of Sana’s twin sister who is dead but continues to haunt the protagonist throughout the story. Further, Khan presents a poignantly eerie tale of Sana and her evil-spirited sister being born with conjoined hips and how the latter dies after the operation that attempts to separate the two. With efficacy, Khan renders Sana’s recalling of this moment as she lies unconscious on the operation table with her dead sister in the lines:
The Preface of the book informs us that 400 years ago, Tulsidas wrote this prayer in Awadhi, an older form of Hindi. It also provides a succinct summary of Rama’s life, linking it with the festival of Diwali. In the next pages it provides a line of Hindi/Awadhi and below it, a transliteration in English.
Bansal skilfully makes and un-makes a mesh of actions and their reactions. While Lipika’s intuitive sense of foreboding sets the mood very early in the novel with her intense dislike of Rahul: ‘How could she expect him (Kartik) to understand, when she herself knew not why she detested him?’ (p. 21), the novel comes alive with a host of other narrative devices such as images that emerge and turn metaphoric. For instance, Lipika’s virulent rashes. Kartik finds them so shocking that he consults Rahul.
The stories are dealt as allegories that offer didactic elements. They question the moral scruples that are encountered by most humans now and provide a resource to try to undo their negative impact by creating an interface of collaboration through empathy. Storytelling since aeons has had the transformative power of regeneration through this empathetic approach. Ganguly, too, by painting the various mise-en-scènes in a delicate manner, has harnessed the power of storytelling through sensitive acuity.
The tragedy of the glorious Achilles who is a pawn of history, an Icarus whose fatal flight is immortalized in a Renaissance painting by Brueghel, and the boy David battling the giant Goliath are all taken out of their textual, monumental existence into a visceral world of imagination and reified there. Further, different civilizational ethos coalesces in a beautiful description of Buddha’s