A book subtitled ‘Remarkable Short Fiction’ will surely include the great storytellers: Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, Kuvempu, RK Narayan, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti, Mahasweta Devi, Vijaydan Detha, Ajeet Cour, Damodar Mauzo, Paul Zacharia and Bama, among others.
Chibo’s quiet landscape and calm rural environment enables an emotional honesty that is often crowded out in the clamour of urban spaces. This distance is critical for Kotoko, who moves away from the commotion of the big city to this curative space, unaware as yet that the pain she carries within her can gradually be healed. The kitchen, located on a secluded stretch of the seashore, is a gentle, comforting place where the dead appear quietly, without fanfare, in a fleeting blur of space and time, stepping back into life for a few moments to connect with a loved one over a ritual meal.
Firefly Games captures the various facets of Bengali culture, both in erstwhile Calcutta and of Bengalis in exile in the heart of India in the States of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. The intricacies of growing up, friendships and heartbreaks, corruption in government offices, relations between parents and their off-spring—Chakraborty touches on these themes and more.
The plot is woven around four main characters: Aurobindo, Manorama, Brajarani and Ajit. Aurobindo’s sister Saratsashi also plays an important part in the web of relationships among these characters, but is not directly affected by their fortunes, whereas the four main characters are affected by each other’s actions. Of course, the person whose character and power drives the plot dies when the narrative begins, but the shadow that he casts on the future course of action never disappears. He is Aurobindo’s father, who decrees that his legatee, Aurobindo, expel his wife Manorama and son, Ajit, and marry a second woman, Brajarani, the daughter of a rich man on account of his social prestige and a handsome dowry that she will bring. Manorama’s father belonged to a lower social class and could not afford any worthwhile dowry.
Interestingly, in the novel, some of the ‘abnormal’ characters say more logical things than the ‘intellectuals’, who are guided by an unbridled desire to consume things offered by the market. Though these individuals are psychic patients in the eyes of ‘mainstream’ society, they uncover the truth behind the normal and efficiently working market system. One character, for example, underlines the absence of dreams in his life, and questions those who laugh at him: ‘I don’t have any dream left, you know. I haven’t had a dream in months.
Indian towns and urbanism (by Helen Millar and AG Krishna Menon) is a synoptic view of colonial planning in the city of Calcutta (Partho Datta). Ranjeeta Dutta takes us back to the early modern Srirangam, via a text called the ‘Koil Olugu’ (‘The Koil Olugu and Srirangam in the Tamil Region’), more properly a temple history. Other accounts of pre-colonial cities and urbanisms include a discussion of Agra (Shailaja Kathuria), Jalandhar (Indu Banga) and a comparison of Calcutta and Delhi (Atiya Habeeb Kidwai).