Dayamayir Katha

This is a book I stumbled upon recently and read at one go. 'Unputdownable!' is so critically callous a phrase that I would not use it for this book. It is the story of a woman of no importance...Daya or Dayamayi...who reminisces ten years of her childhood spent in a remote village in Bangladesh--a village called Dighpait. Simply put, these are the kind of books that make you laugh and cry at the same time. It talks about a world unadulterated by any pretensions that you are familiar with...civility... science...technology...politics...formal education...or anything that you can possibly conceive of. It just tells you a story, exactly the way a story needs to be told. Time and again you would merely be staring at the words on the printed page, as your mind has raced off to forgotten depths of your past...memories of a lost childhood, the face of a half-known relative who you loved, or an event you try frantically to recollect. At the end of it all you realize how you can never write like this, as you have lost that innocence, that clarity of mind and heart which enables you to reminisce in such an unbridled fashion.

The book makes you sad and happy for Daya: sad as she is sad in the writing of the book; happy, as she is so happy in being able to write. It also makes you happy and sad for yourself: happy, as you have come upon and read the book; sad as you will never write like this. Dayamayi's tale is not special in any way..each one of us has such a tale that we carry to our graves or pyres. What propels you into the book is the lucid, sylvan purity with which she could narrate it...the feeling of how she must have garnered each thread for the fabric of her story with a painful ease.



I have not been paid to write a review of the book. I write this of my own accord for those chance readers of my blog.I urge them to read it. There are no postmodern turns in the text, no aporetic jerkiness, no narrative gymnastics, no magic-real pyrotechnics. Read it and you will know JOY

alliterations...

Strange post this to begin with. After quite a long interval I had gone out to the city today. Just like that. Walking up and down those familiar roads...aimlessly, without a care in this world. A walk down Gurusaday Road to Minto Park and back to Lansdowne Road my legs needed some rest and I hopped on a bus. I managed a seat beside one of those twenty year olds who can make you look stupid and backdated at thirty-three--stud and tattoo and i-pod and all. He had a lollypop up his throat when his cellphone buzzed. The person on the other side must have asked him his whereabouts and he promptly replied, 'licking a lolly near lansdowne...love'. It was spontaneous and refreshing, and I suddenly remembered my schooldays. I'd always loved alliterations..and my thoughts travelled. I hated grammar in school...I still do and haven't managed to learn much of it in the intervening years either. But only once in those tedious years of trying to negotiate subordinate clauses and pleading with the verb to agree with the subject that I was kind of attached to my grammar text. It was called English Today by Ronald Ridout. One of the reasons why I had warmed up to that particular book (and I obviously don't remember the volume or the number) was because of an alliteration that I had come across as I opened the book for the first time. It has been with me ever since: If you see a pug little puppy playing ping pong with a pig, or a great grey goat gambling with a goose, would it be half as funny as a Big Brown Belgian Bunny blowing bubbles with a bishop in a boat! Surreal, phantasmagoric, unforgettable. Magic-real, as an afterthought! I was no longer intimidated by the twenty year old. Ye, I was backdated! But I very much belonged to my time!