BookReviews

Abhilash
Newspaper readers will be familiar with some of the short stories in this collection by Rashida Sultana--Shorfuddin Ebong Tar Borolok Attiyer Golpo, Pratyakhyata Protisruta, Gibot, Matal Prithibi Toley, Asroy, Opna Manse Horina Boiri, Acid and Dampotyo--since they have all appeared in daily newspapers over the last couple of years, including a couple of translations into English on this page.

Rashida has a distinct style of telling stories, a cool, dispassionate tone that at times can feel less like a crafted story and more like conversational bits of her own life. This feeling is also reinforced by the abrupt way some of her stories tend to end. But what ultimately remains with the reader is this even tone, a tone that compels her readers to stay with the stories.

The collection starts with 'Shorfuddin ...'. He is a clerk who keeps boasting to all his friends and acquaintances about his VIP cousin, a major general who lives in the cantonment. The major-general and his wife treat Shorfuddin and his wife shabbily, like rich people normally treat their poorer relatives. It is a well-known theme that has been written about before by other writers. But here Rashida's skillful handling of the various characters and her accurate ear for dialogue makes this familiar subject matter come alive. Rashida is very knowledgeable about a particular slice of our middle class, and the reader delights in her expert weaving of this social set-up.

Her main appeal lies in the stories that deal with men-women relationships (Pratyakhyata Protisruta, Matal Prithibi Toley, Asroy, and Dampotyo), in that she writes about love and sexuality, about extra-marital affairs, babies born of such union, of tired sex within dead marriages, in that offhand, dispassionate manner--and which has a way of making a reader think about these things that perhaps a more 'literary' style could not. The absence of guilt, the matter-of-fact acceptance by the women characters of such events in their lives elicits interest: Is this the contemporary Bengali woman, who can no longer afford the luxury of middle-class guilt or moralizing? Even the spark of illicit joy in her stories--the only time metaphors suddenly become giddy, with bodies being flooded by stars--is quickly extinguished in the sodden landscape of middle-class marriages. The men in her stories fail their women; they tease, they arouse deep expectations, and then they fade. Rashida maps this terrain of fading, of disappointment. If she keeps on writing in this vein, one day she will give us a very complete picture of the modern middle-class Bengali woman's alienation from the kind of love and marriage that society foists upon them. And all of it in that suitably unfussy prose style.

This is Rashida Sultana's first book. She is still a beginning writer, something which is evident in some of the stories, which can be said to be underplotted. I also wish this compilation had been named 'Dampotyo', since that is more representative of Rashida's style than the title story.

It is also one of Shraban Prokashani's better productions. The number of typos is comparatively low. But their page setting is as poor as ever: readers must add 4 to each of the pages indicated in the contents to match up. The cover design is attractive; however, the color scheme is dull. Shraban must pay more attention to improving its products.

Abhilash is the pen-name of a free-lance writer and critic.

Under A Cloud : Life in Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth
Binoo K. John, Penguin Books India, 2004,158 pages + xvii.

Zafar Sobhan
Perhaps I should have been warned by the fact that the paperback version of Under A Cloud included lavish words of praise heaped upon Binoo K. John's other travel memoir, The Curry Coast.

Normally, by the time the paperback version of a book is published, one is able to find at least two or three people who have some kind words to say about it.

This is not to say that Under A Cloud is wholly without merit. But I couldn't help thinking, as I read it, that the author had misconceived his entire enterprise.

Let me elaborate.

Cherrapunji, we are informed early on, is the wettest place on earth, receiving an average annual rainfall of about 12,000 millimetres from 1973 to 2001. For the sake of comparison, we are informed that Calcutta receives an average of about 1600 millimetres and Mumbai an average of about 2400 millimetres.

I honestly have to say that for me the matter of whether Cherrapunji is the wettest place on earth is neither here nor there, and I found the author's fascination with this tidbit of information mystifying.

If more rainfall were recorded on a Hawaiian island or somewhere in the jungles of South America would it make one bit of difference to Cherrapunji, and make it less worthy of our attention? I really do not see how this would be the case.

In any event, John's fascination with the precipitation in Cherrapunji did not, to me, translate into moving or insightful writing about the rains and the effect they have on the surrounding areas and its inhabitants.

Having recently taught a class in post-colonial literature, I could not help but contrast John's rather lack-lustre account of the rain-swept Khasi hills with Nirad Chaudhuri's marvelous and majestic descriptions of th e monsoon rainfall in Kishorganj.

Where the book comes alive, however, is in John's description of the beauty of the hills just north of the Bangladesh border, and his account of the lifestyle of the Khasi people who inhabit them.

This, to me, seems to be the heart of Cherrapunji, not the rains, and, although John may be unaware of it, the heart of his book as well.

Cherrapunji, an hour and a half north of Shillong, appears as a wonderfully old-world and traditional corner of India, and John does a good job capturing its atmosphere of calm and tranquillity, far removed from the hustle and bustle of modern India.

The history and sociology of the Khasi people who inhabit the hills is rendered well by the author, and it is fascinating to learn of the impact of the Welsh Presbyterian missionaries in the region, and of the earthquake of 1897, which all but decimated the entire Cherra plateau. Most compelling of all to me is John's depiction of the everyday lives of the Khasi people.

It is in bringing alive to me a part of the world that is often forgotten, and which is also just across the border from us here in Bangladesh, that the book truly succeeds.

I remain supremely indifferent to the precise amount of rain that falls in Cherrapunji, but Under A Cloud did open up to me a world of which I knew little, and it does make me want to take the short trip to the Khasi hills to experience for myself the serene pleasures of life there, and I suppose that that is all one can ask for in a travel book.

Zafar Sobhan is assistant editor, The Daily Star