Arunava Sinha - The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told

Also translated by Arunava Sinha

Khauna-Mihirs Mound by Bani Basu

Seven Heavens by Samim Ahmed

A Mirrored Life by Rabisankar Bal

The Fifth Man by Bani Basu

The Love Letter & Other Stories by Buddhadeva Bose

Tagore for the 21st Century Reader

You are Neera by Sunil Gangopadhyay

The Magic Moonlight Flower and Other Enchanting Stories by Satyajit Ray

Black Rose by Buddhadeva Bose

Dozakhnama by Rabisankar Bal

Wonderworld and Other Stories by Sunil Gangopadhyay

The Rhythm of Riddles: Three Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries by Saradindu

Bandyopadhyay

17 (short stories) by Anita Agnihotri

Fever (Mahakaler Rather Ghora) by Samaresh Basu

Harbart by Nabarun Bhattacharya

When the Time is Right (Tithidore) by Buddhadeva Bose

Three Women: Nashtaneer, Dui Bon, Malancha by Rabindranath Tagore

The Chieftains Daughter (Durgeshnandini) by Bankimchandra

Chattopadhyay

What Really Happened & Other Stories by Banaphool

Striker, Stopper by Moti Nandy

The Middleman (Jana Aranya) by Sankar

My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose

Chowringhee by Sankar

The Merry Tales of Harshabardhan and Gobardhan by Shibram Chakraborty

Panty by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

The Master and I by Soumitra Chatterjee

Kalabati the Showstopper by Moti Nandy

Sabotage & Other Stories by Anita Agnihotri

Abandon (Ruho) by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

By the Tungabhadra by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay

There Was No One at the Bus-Stop by Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay

Illicit by Dibyendu Palit

The Directors Mind by Ujjal Chakraborty

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

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First published in India in 2016 by

Aleph Book Company

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Copyright Arunava Sinha 2016

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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eISBN: 978-93-84067-70-0

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For
Sanghamitra and Srijon
(and Tingmo)

One winter evening in Calcutta, when I was ten, we ran out of food in our third floor flat. It was a freak concatenation of circumstances, not poverty, that led to our predicament, but the fact remained that we had nothing to eat and no money to buy food. And so, to stave off my hunger pangs by distracting me, my mother decided to perform a heroic task. She read me a short story, one of her favourites. My mother loved reading, but not aloud. She did not care for the drama that it involved. A short story, to her, was almost like a guilty secret, something she hugged to herself. She would consume these delicacies at a single sitting, unlike novels that stretched out interminably. Naturally, these were Bengali short stories. It was the 1970s, Bengali literature was in its heydayas it had been for some forty yearsand who needed fiction in another tongue?

She began reading out loud a story of an ox and its miserable owner. As she read, her voice broke, though to my young ears the pathos seemed entirely unnecessary, for I was much more interested in the fate of the animal than of its human owner. But as she continued with the tale something extraordinary began to take placeI wasnt so much listening to the words as I was seeing and hearing all that was going on. I was right there in the very scene that was being described, not as an invisible observer, but as someone who was part of the story.

To this day, I cannot make a story my own unless it places me right in the middle of the action. And no novel can do this, for there is too much reflection, thought, shift of perspective, and other distractions. But a short story, ah, now thats one breathless ride. And so it was that night, when I even forgot to be hungry. But when the fate of the beast was known, I felt the urge to repay my mother for her act of sacrifice. So I plundered the cache of coins I had saved up. All of them were foreign, except for two commemorative Indian coins, one for a rupee and the other for ten rupees. Those denominations were only available as paper currency at the time, which made the coins collectors items. But no matter, it was money well spent. I wanted my mother to get her favourite Chinese meal from the restaurant next doorchicken asparagus soup and prawn chowmein.

From that night onwards, the Bengali short story has been my companion in grief and in joy. Take, for example, that glorious English summer day when I sat by a stream running through leaf and fern, almost certainly about to make a sudden sally. On that day, on a university campus in Norwich, in weather as magnificent as a human being can expect, I was in great humour and it was in that mood that I read one of the stories that feature in this collection: a story about a man who was quaking in fear at the prospect of an encounter with his son-in-law.

Or, to mention another time that a Bengali short story loomed large in my life, one evening, I was crouched beneath a desk to shut myself off from the world, loaded down with a despair whose origin I simply could not trace. In my hand was a copy of a tattered little magazine from Calcutta in which there was a story about a mother who refused to acknowledge that her Naxal son had died. My own sorrow was forgotten as I plunged into hers. Only at the end of the story did I recollect an episode from my teenage years when I had gone to inspect a row of bodies gunned down by the police to check whether a relative was among them. (He wasnt.) So it is that I have my personal story to go with every story in this collection.

I am no scholar of Bengali literature, but I have had a passionate relationship with it for some forty years now. That passion has given me the courage, after all these years, to put together a selection of Bengali stories that are, in my opinion, among the greatest ever published. I must make clear though that this is not a selection based on literary eras, canons, trends, or any other form of critical sieving. Nor is it meant to be a representative cross section of the Bengali short story. These are, simply, stories I have loved and that have made a deep impression on me. Somewhat fortuitouslyI wish I could claim that it is by design, but, frankly, its notthe stories here collectively show the rich variety to be found in Bengali literaturewhether in terms of form, voice, setting or subject. In all of them, though, I find one particular quality that haunts the characters, and me. It is the sense of something missing, and the search for it. In every story I have come to cherish, there is inevitably a seeking of what is not, what probably cannot be. But then again, isnt this what differentiates the meaninglessness of daily events from the world that comes from the imagination of an artist?