Tag Archives: Literature-Fiction

The richly textured sections on semi-urban and rural Bangladesh are remarkable for visual details. Imagine this: A ‘gora’ missionary holding a bundle of dirty clothes is lowering himself gingerly into a scum-covered pukur to wash himself and his garments. The steps are broken and slippery and a large, cheering audience of locals is shouting instructions! Here is another

In between the tidy frame is a story well worth telling—of the unique socio-political situation of Goa that made possible a wide variety of relationships between people of different communities—Hindu Indians, Catholic Indians, Portuguese whose ties were with Europe, and descendants of Portuguese extraction who were as much sons and daughters of Goan soil as the Indians.

Among the protagonists of the novel are dwellers of Zamin Par, occupants of Zamin Andar and spirits of Zamin Upar, all of whose comings and goings have been inextricably woven together into the narrative. Intertwining the humdrum of daily human existence are stories of the superior knowledge or comprehension of prophesies, extrapolations, curses, and spells cast by supra-terrestrial peris

It is in these moments in the book that Dhingra’s extraordinary writing skills manage to transfer the olfactory effects experienced by her, for the readers to vicariously savour through her descriptive details about the fragrances.

Set in Nepal and its borderlands before the arrival of the internet, the novel begins by describing the marriage of a fourteen-year-old Meena with Manmohan, a twenty-one-year-old Nepali boy she has never met. The narrative documents Meena’s problematic marital journey and her diasporic life.

Death, the time and manner of its arrival, how it transforms people and their lives, and the ways in which each person deals with his/her loss, grappling with guilt, regret, questioning—is almost a character as it moves through the pages, forcing the reader to confront those very feelings of loss

The book also gives hindsight into the shrinking spaces in academic institutions and the rise of Right-Wing politics in India. This is demonstrated when the narrator’s student Salman is killed for his love affair with a Hindu woman. Pat, who runs a signature campaign for his justice, has been charged by the police for doing so.

Incidentally, the novel is one long narration, with no chapter divisions. It is also significant that there are very few dialogues. We see and hear everything through the stream of the narrator’s own consciousness, though he repeatedly complains that his story is controlled by others.

Well one may ask, what is this naïve eulogy on spiritual journeys? Is this reviewer not aware of the corrupt practices of big and small ‘spiritual’ establishments of this land? She is. As she is aware of the universal need for compassion and goodness.

The novel is premised on the inner lives of three eponymous and devoted women on the Coromandel Coast during British imperialism. Their intertwined lives along the Coromandel coast aim to recover and reframe the personal and public lives of women in the subcontinent, especially during the British colonial period.

Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I’d never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles here and reminiscing about my own.

At one point in Rimli Sengupta’s debut novel A Lost People’s Archive (2023) the ghost of the novel’s protagonist Shishu laments that Indians never kept archives unlike Romans and Chinese

Mallika’s memory loss of three days. From there on we are led on a voyage of perspectives, and each of them showcases the richness of the inner lives of these characters.