Short Stories on Precarity

About five years back, I was waiting at the Bagdogra airport on my way back to Kolkata from Darjeeling after a short holiday. The taste of Darjeeling tea and the images of misty hills and roads were still fresh in my mind. Nothing much to do, I entered the bookshop at the airport. It was a small one with the usual types of books one finds in airport bookshops. But there was one book named No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight: Memories of a Hill Town by a certain Parimal Bhattacharya (2017), an author I was not familiar with. I thought “oh my God, here’s another author, who has written another book on West Bengal,” and I have to read it, and since I try to keep track of the literature on the state, I bought the book.

Starting with the name itself, it soon became clear to me that this is an unusual book by an unusual author. He was neither writing fiction nor a ­social science academic monograph. He did not have any argument (or thesis) about the Gorkhaland agitation, but it was impossible to put down the book without finishing it. There was something about the prose that had a haunting quality to it, which made the book impossible to forget. I checked and found that the author teaches literature in a suburban college and writes in both English and Bengali on varied subjects.