Title: The One Legged
Author: Sakyajit Bhattacharya
Translated: Rituparna Mukherjee
Language: English
Publisher: Antonym Collections
Pages: 76 pages
ISBN: 978-8196395377
Format: Paperback
Price: ₹335
Bengalis are a curious lot. There was a time when they laughed with and at the gods and the epics (Sukumar Ray’s Lokkhoner Shoktishel comes to mind), took an active front-row seat in fighting the British, had the state divided into two, and then the cultural milieu with the refugee influx after the partition with two football teams becoming symbols of identity and belonging. To top it off, the entire cultural fabric is a repository of stories—mythical, historical, political, and the ghostly. This sea of stories, a term for which I remain indebted to one of Rushdie’s classics, is a whirlpool that will never run dry and never cease to entertain and amaze.
Like a master of the craft, he teases the readers from one page to the next, challenges the reader to piece together the narrative and once the end is reached, he makes the reader/s go back into the narrative to confirm clues that were already there and utter a sigh reminiscent of the feeling of disappointment that the key to the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle was always there in front of our eyes.
Authors writing in Bangla have forever molded and challenged generic classifications and boundaries. Satyajit Bhattacharya’s Ekanore (Tr. The One Legged) is an addition to Bengali Horror literature’s ever-expanding and already rich canon. The novel, with the central character Tunu, a nine-year-old boy, may seem to be directed to the teenage readership at the onset. But this is where Sakyajit Bhattacharya takes us back to the words of Satyajit Ray. In one of his Feluda adventures (Nayan Rahasya), Ray makes Feluda address the issue of dwindling readership when he remarks to the reader and Lal Mohun Babu that many crimes don’t and shouldn’t make it to the pages of the book because they are not suitable for his readers, who range from the pre-teens to the octogenarians. This limitation is not a limitation at all but a commentary on the lasting legacy and appeal of the detective series across generations and all age groups.
The One Legged (I will use the English title for future reference in this review) may seem to fall into the canon of folk horror. The publisher would like to classify the novel as an example of Speculative Fiction. But as has been rightly mentioned in the translator’s notes, this, I believe, may be misleading to a large degree. That particular kind of fiction generally refers to works with elements of science fiction that can possibly come true in the future. In that vein, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid’s Tale, and even Satyajit Ray’s Professor Shonku adventure Compu are examples of Speculative Fiction. The One-Legged leans more towards the psychological with elements of the mythic.
Ghosts and myths have been an inextricable part of the experience of growing up in the Bengali culture. Since childhood, there has hardly been any child who has not been regaled and simultaneously scared off by the stories of the exploits of different kinds of ghosts. Most of these instances were because these stories were used as a kind of exercise to keep the child in check so that s/he wouldn’t wander off. But it did add to the already colorful repertoire of ghosts and spirits—some funny, some harmful, some existing in the air with a tinge of malice, some still in the thrall of the culinary even after death. Still, all feeding off the fertile imagination of the child.
To read The One Legged as merely part of the folk and psychological horror tradition would be reductive and do injustice to the novel. I say this because hidden beneath the veneer of a suspenseful, fast-paced narrative are issues that have existed in Indian society for as long as we can remember—namely, Gender and Caste Identity. The Bengali “bhadralok” has, due to its exposure to Marxist literature and 34 years of Communist rule, been almost deliberately ostrich-like in its recognition and affirmation about discrimination and violence based on caste. In a memorable utterance by the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, the issue was brought to the forefront and almost prophetically settled when he remarked on the lines of that fact that in Bengal, there is no caste but instead class. Of course, that is understandable, given his political affiliation and his intellectual makeup. But the marginalization of the subaltern communities in Bengal, both in the city and the country, is a living reality.
Bhattacharya brings this to the forefront more than once in his novel. When the child of the servant of the house goes missing, and the Police Inspector orders a search operation late into the evening, one of the police officers remarks in irritation as to why such an effort needs to be undertaken for the child of a lower caste man. The caste identity is imprinted in the minds of almost all the characters throughout their childhood into adulthood. In fact, in one of the most startling episodes of the novel, it is revealed that the issue of caste played a significant role, which led the lower caste children to contribute to the death of someone with substantial economic and caste privilege. It is a fact, invisible laws etched in an invisible social register that some women/men are born more equal than the others, and any attempt to efface this difference is seen through the lens of suspicion. Conversations, innocuous in themselves, bring out how the world is loaded against the ones on the lower rungs of the caste hierarchy.
And then come the women. Despite all the cries about feminism and equal rights, the lived reality for women, even in the upper echelons of society, is far from ideal. Tunu’s grandmother, whose real name people had forgotten once she had been married and then gave birth to her two kids, always existed as someone’s wife and mother, her agency and identity effaced from public memory. This is the case of an upper-class woman. For the even more unfortunate women belonging to the lower caste, the marginalization is dual—in terms of both gender and caste—subsumed and dominated by men from the higher caste and also from within their community. It is debatable if there is a ghost in the novel, but there are corpses, some dead and some alive, and suffering for the rest of their lives.
What makes this novel stand out from others published in recent memory is the author’s liberty in shaping the narrative. Stories that deal with murders and mayhem, disappearance and reappearances, fear palpable and of the mind, need to have crisp, suggestive, and a racy narrative. Sakyajit Bhattacharya achieves that and much more. Like a master of the craft, he teases the readers from one page to the next and challenges the reader to piece together the narrative. Once the end is reached, he makes the reader/s go back into the narrative to confirm clues that were already there and utter a sigh reminiscent of the feeling of disappointment that the key to the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle was always there in front of our eyes.
Read More : From The Frontline
Since I have read the novel in translation, it would be unfair if I did not put in a word about the translated text. Translations are often seen as a kind of compromise, a sort of baggage that the reader carries, knowing that a translated text from a source language unknown to her/him is the best thing to offer, no matter what the quality of the translation may be. The translator, too, needs to straddle two linguistic realms and two cultural realms, ensuring that the cultural nuances and intricacies are introduced and preserved for the reading public.
Rituparna Mukherjee’s translation situates the text within the Bengali social and cultural ethos—the festival issue of the Anandamela, a children’s magazine, the Puja Vacations, the very identifiable village fair with its share of entertainment and religiosity—are things that the Bengali reader would at once feel home at. And I think it is crucial for the sinew of the novel.
By the time the reader realizes the true nature of the horror, s/he also realizes that this story needs to be situated within the Bengali milieu to establish the protean nature of the fear and grief that have dogged a village for almost a generation.