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