The stories in Mandira Chakraborty’s debut collection take us back to a time when things were simpler and life was lived making sense of the world around us through communication with people in flesh and blood. Chakraborty presents to us a world where Man and Nature lived in harmony and not in conflict, where the young and the old savoured the time lapse between them.
The stories are set in different temporal and spatial planes. The author’s growing up in Madhya Pradesh in a residential colony housing government workers is a throwback to the times when such colonies were considered symbols of progress and middle-class aspirations. With different linguistic, cultural, religious and sartorial markers they were, in fact, a microcosm of the country, founded on democratic ideals and secularism. In ‘Sita’s Last Act’, Chakraborty takes us to a past unsullied by communal hatred, where the Ram Leela celebrations would bring together people from different castes and creeds in a cultural carnival celebrating the victory of good over evil.
July 2025, volume 49, No 7