Tag Archives: Literature-In Translation-Hindi

This gutsy collection’s outstanding short story is ‘Field Report from Roop Nagar’, a supernatural and grisly account of mysterious developments and utter anarchy in Roop Nagar, where the narrator’s parents are trapped. The narrator’s journalist friend, Shaagar Sengupta, sends him a gruesome video of a girl being hacked to pieces and then cooked to be eaten. The perpetrators commit this heinous crime as part of a plan to eliminate all loose-character girls from the town. All the denizens of Roop Nagar are in a metaphorical slumber and state of unresponsiveness. The story gets a supernatural twist when the narrator realizes that Shaagar died in Roop Nagar and it was his ghost who had sent him the video and was making regular phone calls.

Overwhelmed by the impulse to record everything; to emphasize the inability to say what exactly happened at the moment of violence, Shree’s narrator deliberately interrupts comprehension. Why it happened is one prominent re-appearing question; several times, the narrative drives home the fatiguing logic that none ‘of this is sudden; it happened before too. Only now it’s coming out into the open.’ How to make sense of what happened is yet another, perhaps even harder, question: Shruti, the novel’s female protagonist, struggles to write about it. Shruti’s inability to write this affects her ability at being; she is, after all, a writer by profession.

In the stories, Deepak emerges as a master narrator who calibrates movements of his characters to generate necessary suspense. The names of the characters are often revealed only after two-three pages. And often anecdotes and sub-plots thicken the texture of the stories. The settings in the stories are functional, and dynamic in the sense that their details keep recurring in a haunting way.