101 is auspicious perhaps to ward off the readers’ profane thoughts and to invoke the humane sublimity in them. If brevity is the soul of wit, then these are not just brief tell tales but are close to Sufistic and Biblical aphorisms. Some of the tales have a philosophical and ethical slant while some are able to depict and reflect upon the socio-economic processes as well. For instance, the story titled ‘Sage’
That earlier urgency diminished, and with it, a certain fire; the impulse to know more, understand more, and remain connected to one’s immediate oral environment. In linguistics classes, the first thing we are taught is how words are produced in the mouth as we speak them.
The play of colour, shapes, forms, and contrasts of light and dark is Sen’s métier, making cognition of the precepts in this volume predominantly visual. Even though this volume is black-and-white, he captures the Arjuna tree’s transformation across the day in captivating prose. When it catches the first rays of the sun, it looks like Gautama Buddha in deep meditation. At high noon, in the harsh mercury-white light and lamp-black shadows,
This restrained fury runs through the collection’s most recent poems. They come from a tradition of Bengali literary conscience that has always understood literature as a moral act. Sengupta continues that tradition without announcing it. His poem ‘Tradition’ turns a familiar concept into something quietly subversive:
they were branded as criminals by the British under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, which made their traditional way of life illegal. Junglee, a Pardhi girl herself, protects a vulnerable tiger cub, even though her community is blamed for hunting such animals.
The ‘secret question’ works like a small lesson in resistance. When the ghost copies the mother’s voice, the girl uses what she knows about her widowed mother. She remembers that her mother does not apply alta. She even breaks the rule about not touching the chuhla to burn the ghost’s wolf-foot,