Having been a tree-spotter for over a dozen years, this reviewer was growing increasingly frustrated as every new book on trees-and a fair number of glossies have been published on the subject in the last five or six years-did nothing better than re¬chronicle the semals,
Those of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies, nurtured on Bangla literature, regarded Byomkesh Bakshi as our very own Sherlock Holmes and a very convincing and effective one at that. From the same standpoint Ajit, his assistant, emerges as an equally Dr Watson.
‘Life doesn’t have a plot. We don’t know what is going to happen next year, so I let the story develop like that. I like to write it that way, as the unknown unfolds’ It is thus that Ananda Mukerji commented on the unfolding of his first novel And Where, My Friend, Lay You Hiding?
The book under review is a notable addition to the canon of literature in translation. It showcases fourteen stories of Raghbir Dhand who occupied a prominent place among the pioneer writers of the Punjabi diaspora, settled in England. His fictional world as represented in these stories offers a great range in terms of variety of themes, ideas, technique and craft.
Strangeness and surprise, endorsed by academic approval, are Lehman’s basic criteria of choice here. Realizing Americas multiplicity of taste and culture, he prefers to call the corpus ‘American poetries’ (p. viii) instead of just ‘American poetry’, and consequently offers a much wider canon than before.
There are three texts waiting to be discussed here: the ‘original’ Chaklet, a collection of eight Hindi stories written by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’ published in 1927 after five of them were serialized in Matvala, a Calcutta based Hindi weekly; its translation into English by Ruth Vanita titled Chocolate