Author: Dibyendu Palit
Translator(s): Santanu Sinha Chaudhuri
Publisher: Indialog Publications
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8187981334
Description
This volume, an anthology of twelve short stories by Dibyendu Palit, a noted Bengali writer, is evocative of the growing isolation in an urban context. The drama of everyday life and the focus on the inner world of the characters – are beautifully captured in the stories in this volume.
Amongst others, the faces in this volume are of a middle-class man whose won weakness forces him to look up to the local ruffian to protect him against more ruffians like him; a housewife who feels trapped in a marriage that tie her destiny with the runs scored by her cricketer husband; and a mother living out her last days in an old-age home finding escape from her alienation by surrounding herself with imagined faces of the loved ones who never visit her.
COMMENT:
For more than four decades, Dibyendu Palit has been a chronicler of the passions, pathos, trivialities and extraordinariness of the ordinary. His work does not span geographical distances and historical time. When it does so, it usually comes back to the close-by and the familiar, propelled by the conviction that the unfamiliar or strange can be captured within the familiar and the known.
- Ashis Nandy
Contents
Crossing the streets of the mind foreword by Ashis Nandy
Advent
Alam’s own house
Antara
The birth and death of mother Teresa
Brazil
Gavaskar
Jetlag
Under a moonlit night
The national Flag
The Faces
The Savior
Values