A Melancholic Portrait

Book Review

Written in Tears written by Arupa Patangia Kalita, translated from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas. 

Eight stories like eight vivid pictures, all knotted together by invisible threads of loss, grief, pain, anger, desperation, pictures of common man entangled in a constant strife with an eternal longing for peace. The author, a Sahitya Akademi winner for the year 2014, retains a highly melancholic and wistful mood all through the book.

Arunima's motherland and the Half burnt bus at midnight are excellent stories and my favorites from this collection.

Not all fingers in a hand are the same, and the same holds for members in a family; one goes astray and becomes a militant and pushes his entire family into a deep vortex of complete devastation. Arunima, Abinash, Rupam, Baby - the characters in Arunima's motherland pull you into understanding the plight of errors they never committed themselves.

The half burnt bus at midnight is a metaphor for all things evil - hatred for immigrants, internecine killings, violence, bloodshed, misplaced ideals that wreak complete havoc, so what happens when one such bus arrives into an otherwise peaceful village?

The Cursed Fields of Golden Rice has lot of local folklore, local beliefs, Bodo hymns, a simple story woven around how some when displaced from their homeland can never actually fit anywhere else.

Face in the mirror just didn't work for me. The last four tales - Kunu's mother, The Girl with long hair, Surabhi Barua and the Rhythm of hooves, Ayengla of the blue hills have very powerful female protagonists who question and fight injustice in their own ways despite knowing they are most vulnerable. Their longing for freedom and peace hurts you so much that you wonder how different lives become by just being born into a certain home/family in a certain region, a thing on which we absolutely have no control.

The post script states how Arupa always remained a keen and sensitive observer of the ills that plague her beautiful land, for it is her up close encounters with problems that leave an emotional hangover in us after we finish the book. Pick this up for a read to step into shoes of those for whom ordinary existence seems extraordinarily difficult.