Tales From Two Places
The first place is Assam, next door to Bangladesh. In fact, Next Door (Penguin India, 2008) is the name of this collection of eleven stories by Jahnavi Barua. Reprinted above, the title story gives some clue of the author's willingness to depict Assamese life in the raw. The book's strength lies in its blend of convent school perfect English with an inherently languid Assamese core, where the tonalities of modern life - as Assamese, like people everywhere else, travel abroad, study at Harvard, live in America, come back to their homeland for visits - flow easily into a language that can frequently, and comfortably, adopt, slip in and out of, Assamese phrases and words. The lives depicted, the setting in which they take place with its blend of greenery and low-scale urban structures, and the thoughts of the characters make these stories Assamese - and through them all flows the Brahmaputra! Yet, to the surprise of many of us ignorant about modern-day life in Assam, as noted above, its tales of its upper class acting like the upper class anywhere in the subcontinent, flying in and out of their land, toting along accessories and brands that the more 'developed' among us were supposed to be familiar with makes them something a little apart from what is expected. Some of the stories have political overtones, representative of voices living lives on the margin, about innocence lost, or deliberately manipulated, or cheated. Concealed within the story 'River of Live', with its central character a retarded boy, are barbed statements that perhaps a fellow Assamese or pahari or any number of other marginalized and exploited peoples of modern-day India, or indeed the whole world, will instinctively understand: Trust no authority (especially those appointed to look after your interests: the Supreme Court, the government, the politicians), fight to keep what is precious in your culture safe from destruction, do not be embarrassed if the outside world thinks of you as 'backward' or 'retarded' (for it is so only by their definitions). Other stories are quieter, more in the realm of the domestic, as in 'The Favourite Child' where four daughters gathered around their dying mother become sisters together again, then break apart over their collective past. All the stories straddle the space between these two poles, and this first ever collection of stories by this Assamese writer indeed holds much promise of things to come. Barua lives in Banglore, trained as a doctor, but now is a full-time writer. In 2006 she was awarded a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship to study creative writing in the UK.
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