<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt">Any one above 40 reading Siddhartha Dev’s debut novel will be forced to make an inward journey retracing their steps into the past and revisiting their history. This book can be read and read again and each time with different emotions. At one level , this an account of the life of one Dr Dam , a retired veterinary surgeon who had to migrate from the Sylhet area of Bangladesh in to Meghalaya when it was still part of Assam , served first the Assam and then the Meghalaya government with distinction and then as the North East of India got engulfed in to ethnic turmoil was again termed an outsider in the very soil he had served all his life and in the evening of his life had to retreat into another Bengali ghetto of Silchar where the Assamese looked upon them with derision as Bengalis and the genteel Bengali elite Calcutta sneered at them for their peculiar East Bengali accent. At another level , it is another piece of documentation on the effects of the less violent but certainly no less painful effects of the partition on the Bengalis – whose echoes echo percolate to this date – infiltrator if Muslim and refugee if Hindu – both terms not conducive to enhancing human dignity.</div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt"> </div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt">At another level , it is the story of a young man – a man with very different values discovering his father , a man of another generation scarred by partition and its economic woes compounded with family burdens as he first retires from his job , then has a stroke and gets disabled and his stature and status in life steadily diminishes. In the fears, despair and hopelessness of his father’s situation, is mirrored his own fears and alienation from the place he calls home but in local parlance is an outsider – in his father’s life long wanderings is the foreboding of what is to come in his life, in reaching out to his father in his need and weakness is the realization rootlessness is almost a way of life in our times. Seeped in the nuances of local ethnic identities and clashes of North East India, the pain and alienation caused by displacement that occurs due to far reaching political events beyond one’s control, every word in the book is tinged with prose that is melodic with poetry and dipped with the sadness of nostalgia. Fittingly enough, the book jacket includes a quote by Ursula K Le Guin <em>“You can go home again… so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been in”. </em>Equally fittingly, Siddhartha Deb dedicates the book to his father Ranjit Lal Deb.</div>
previous article: To feel or distain; a path of pain
next article: The Great Mother
Leave Your Comments