I must begin by saying that I loved this book. Name Place Animal Thing is about growing up as a Khasi girl in the ever politically-charged Shillong. It is a book of connected stories rather than a novel or novella (as the inner cover describes it), the stories connected by the first-person narrator referred to as D. The stories are told by an adult narrator who is recollecting her past, her childhood and young adulthood.
The very first story ‘Bahadur’ sets the tone for the rest of the book. Each of the stories is about a person and an episode or two in the life of the narrator. Bahadur is a general handyman who lives in the same locality as the narrator’s family and does odd jobs for everyone on this estate. As his name shows, he is a Nepali in a place that is soon to assert its native identity in sporadic but violent ways. Bahadur is employed by Mrs Guha who owns the part of the hill where various families live on rent. She too lives there in an Assam type house as the narrator notes. The narrator is only seven years old then, the same as Ajay, the youngest of Bahadur’s children. D is friends with Bahadur’s family and loves to eat with them in their shanty. We have the picture of a place where people of different ethnicities live together in peace, all of them exploiting Bahadur.