Between Witness and Word

I dedicated my thirteenth literary work, a novel, to Baba with a stanza from my poem Peling, which was published in my second book consisting of a long story cycle and a poetry cycle.

The stanza reads as follows: Can you tell me what happens between fathers and sons In the depths of woods When hyenas are resting in the mountain caves?

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Baba had read all my books and the major part of my journals and appreciated them. But when this book was published, he was on his deathbed and only had the opportunity to see the dedication page. He did not read the book. That is a tragedy which cannot be described in words. The Box and The Byline starts with a prologue followed by thirty-six chapters and ends with an epilogue. Amongst these thirty-six chapters, chapter one of the fictional novel, starts with a reportage by the protagonist Sanjoy Sen on the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984.

The chapters are set in the backdrop of the restless sweep of recent Indian history until 2024, the fulcrum point being 1992 during which year Babri Masjid was demolished and Sanjoy’s Ma died. The book moves from the shocks of the 1980s through the decades that follow – years when the country is beset by turbulences. Fires, explosions of bombs…the poison, the dust. One finds cities under curfew, hospitals overflowing with patients, draconian policies that arrive first as rumours and later as stamped forms, and crises that change the vocabulary of ordinary lives. But the reporting refuses to fall prey to sensationalism. It keeps returning to the real…. scenes of long queues that bend like question marks, a waterline measured on a wall, a neighbourhood learning new routes around fear.

The second-last chapter takes us to the horror of being a marginalized North-Eastern state. The second chapter onwards are epistolary in nature: letters shared between Sanjoy and his long-time friend Anita since their Jadavpur University days. Anita moves to the USA for higher studies on the strength of her GRE score and later she settles there for work, marriage and children. If the reportage clippings carry the discipline of the newsroom – facts under oath, verbs chosen for accuracy – the letters carry the counterweight that makes such discipline possible. Anita writes from across the ocean. It is a place where she is building an academic life: archives and classrooms, Whitman and Shakespeare, the precise pleasures of teaching, the domestic geology of marriage and motherhood, and the timeless labour she names “late care.”

Sanjoy writes from the city desk and the road, from protest sites and relief camps, from bureau rooms where deadlines behave like weather, and from the long interior afternoons after the news has moved on. Their correspondence reminds us that private language does not compete with public history; it is one of the ways people survive it. In the epistolary part of the novel the grey zone between friendship and romantic love is examined. So, it is a compilation of the public world in collaboration with the personal world. How, then, should one enter this book? Perhaps the way its narrator proposes: with two sheets laid side by side, left for the public, right for the private. Read the clippings for their restraint, and notice what that restraint costs. Read the letters for their ordinary courage, and notice how often courage looks like logistics – food, sleep, care, repetition.

This book rewards a slower pace; each clipping carries its silences, each letter its edits, and the spaces between them are a part of the meaning. Let the alternation become a metronome. And when you reach the last pages, return to the sentence that holds the whole arrangement together: “Witness is a kind of love.” Not love as possession or spectacle, but love as the hard daily labour of attention – accurate, compassionate, and willing to admit what it cannot know. The box preserves that labour. The byline owns it. The book has been published by Sherni, The Tigress Roars, the English Imprint of the Rhito Prakashan. The book was launched in Kolkata on March 21 at the Bhawanipur House to an eclectic and resounding gathering of book lovers of Kolkata. The book launch was organized by the Rising Asia Foundation.