Letter From Khulna
Tales of Bagerhat Village Life
Sunil Gangapadhyay, in a lecture given in a function arranged by the little magazine Kobita Shankranti said that our fiction writers have not yet fully explored the richness of rural Bangladesh. He mentioned William Faulkner, who never wrote about anything outside the purview of his town and its two-mile expanse. Prasanta Mridha's fictions make a strong case in point. He has already made his presence in the literary scene by collections like Kuhakbivram, Poithar Taan, and Tero O Oboshisto Choi. Most of the stories in the previous collections deal with the social and natural setting of rural Bagerhat ranging invariably across two or three villages and treating the emotions, inter-relations and sufferings of its inhabitants as its subject-matter. Korunar Porijan, the seventh of his short story collections, is no exception.
Set in a typical village of the eastern region of Bagerhat, the stories illuminate the crises of a poverty-stricken family as well as the beauty of outstretching fields, thatched huts with thickly grown trees, and the soothing pond across the yard. Nature is shown to leave its indelible mark on the mental set-up of the characters. Anyone familiar with the author's works also knows about his fondness for the local form of spoken language. In this collection he has exceeded them all in the mastery of describing one of Bagerhat's dialects with unerring exactness. He is at his best when he glides past one natural location to another offering us an all-encompassing portrayal of village life, a trend which has become rare these days in the face of modern Bangla literature focusing solely on the psychological complexities of urban life.
What is completely new is the structure whereby one can consider each story as a separate entity in its own right, and yet link them all to weave a new whole. A collection of five stories, with each revolving around a particular member of the same family: Koruna, her school-going daughters (Nilima and Purnima), only son (Nanda) and her mother (Bimala). As the reader passes from one story to the next, these different stories read like chapters in a novel.
Veja Dupur, the first of the series, is about Koruna's concern for her son's short height. Compounding this is his susceptibility to illness which runs like an undercurrent throughout the stories, constituting one of Koruna's persistent worries. The second story, Bimala Sundarir Passport, stands apart in that it goes beyond the village as far as the border putting Bimala and Nilima in the larger social context where they are to be identified as the Other, as someone who essentially belongs to a minority group. The story is about the forged identity of Nilima as Bimala's daughter on the passport, where the story creates, extends and then resolves the tension superbly in the end. The narrative shifts to the past in the third story, Koruna Dhaleer Biroho Milon, where it is seen that Bimala with her two sons and a daughter experienced abandonment. Acting as the nucleus, this story proceeds through Koruna's reminiscences, letting us know how she got married and was deserted by her husband, much like her mother had been. As the story wraps up, we get the melancholic picture of Koruna sitting on the verandah with her obsessive gaze, as if fixed under a magic spell, in the direction of her in-laws' house.
The fourth story, Josnai Nilima, picks up Nilima again attending to her psychic dimensions played out against the background of a clear cloudless sky. Besides being hard of hearing, she is also forgetful and dim-witted, a fact that foreshadows in Koruna's eye the grim fate, much like her own, that awaits her elder daughter. The last story, Choitrashangkrantir Aage, sharply differs as it alone ends on an optimistic note. Focusing on Purnima, the only normal child, it deals with her post-adolescent fantasies about another teen, Subash. As a result of his wooing, they meet furtively at a village fair, and at the end are seen walking down a village road when everybody else is busy at the bustling Boishakhi Mela. This outrageous walk, however unrealistic it might seem, sets her apart as a character who dares to make her own choices.
Reading the stories at a stretch and taking notice of their interconnectedness, one may conclude that the characters, with all their similarities and contrasts, are intertwined in the wider context of a novel. Apart from this, what gets our attention is the serenity of the charming landscape, the crop-bursting fields and midnight mysteries of the rain-swollen marshes, the silently flowing river and the rains. Seen from the perspective of Sunil Gangapadhyay's remarks, this collection emerges as a notable rendering of village life as immersed in Nature, which is precisely what makes for a commendable read.
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