14th August – A Letter

Reading Sutanu Mitra’s slim novel 14th August – A Letter must be a rewarding experience to all. It would be wrong to place it in line with world classics in the genre like Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nor possibly was it intended to be. But if narrative power, story-telling skill, dexterous knitting of threads of narrative, wealth of experience, acuity of observation together be the hallmark of a good fiction, it is assuredly a good piece if not a great one.
The tale begins with Rupa’s unfinished letter to her fiancé Supriya drafted on 14 February, 2014 but never sent, and it ends with another letter she manages to finish on 14th August of the same year. But the tale is not limited to the intervening six months, for through flashbacks the reader is taken not only to the school days of Rupa and her friend Titli but to the early days of their parents and even beyond that –when women suffered the abjection and torture of suttee. The focus of the novel is the evolution of man woman relation – how in the past a celibate like Dwarika would sacrifice his vow and marry a girl in order to protect her from social stigma, how a nonagenarian widow like Smritibala who greets her university-going granddaughter with public kissing on her forehead would cherish a dream of marrying off her granddaughter before her death, how a mother like Malati would never think of seeking the daughter’s consent before the marriage is arranged, how a girl of yesterday like Swati would sacrifice her own dreams and agree to an arranged marriage to please her near relations, and, finally, how a present generation girl of high social standing like Titli would venture to vanquish the ‘obscene vanity’ of her family and choose as her life partner an idol-maker, scornfully described as kumor by his educated father, himself sexually exploiting his students without any prick of conscience. One would be disappointed if one here looks for complex human probing or profound philosophical reflections that account for the depth of a great narrative. But this does not mean that its moving power is un-borrowed from keenness of observation or unmarked by uncommonness of the outlook of the narrator. Consider, for example, the self-realization of Rupa who observes kite-flying through the lenses of her binoculars and accepts V-O-K-A-T-A (symbolizing alienation) without sentimental fret and fume: ‘Man, perhaps, likes to cling to fellow man, fellow pet, fellow god, fellow guru, fellow room, fellow nature and fellow organization. He lives in a land of fellows’. (162). Indeed, it is this search for fellows in this form or that that binds together the multiple threads of the narrative.
The following two excerpts, depicting the evening sky in the rainy season and the cloudless stretch of blue respectively will bear ample testimony to the force of narration: ‘A dim red had just scattered through the eastern sky; only for moments. In no time some dark clouds rushed in monstrously and covered it. A part of the sky then looked as black and solid as granite. The granite rolled on to the other end with some rumble. Then the dullness diluted, getting smokily white’ (11). ‘There was no trace of clouds. The sky seemed to be in great hurry to rectify yesterday’s aberration’ (24). The author knows how to maintain vividness without verbal haemorrhage. Mark this small description of the Jhulan-show : ‘Here was the world of blend: real, unreal, surreal. The bigger world got abbreviated to its smaller replica. Its mobility was inert’ (34). The same precision is found in the portrayal of characters and expression of attitude: ‘They (Rupa and Titli) were the close friends. They were the fierce competitors. Their competitiveness intensified their proximity’ (38). The basti people mired in unspeakable mirth and poverty ‘were meant to suffer everything, from poverty to indignity to death, without protest’ (47). What is singularly unique is not the author’s observation as such but reflection on what has been observed. When Niren’s father Bimal who had succumbed to TB due to malnutrition was being taken to the burning ghat: ‘Bimal’s head was turning from side to side on the bamboo bier. The dead was alive in a gesture of rejection’ (49). The rejection in question is the rejection of the system in which the poor are not provided for but politicians try to fish in troubled waters when they die. The author holds that the system continues because of the silence of the affected but he also tries to put under scanner why they are silent: “After all, they could not stand the risk of inviting any danger to their life from the frequent sloganeering, flag-brandishing, “down with imperialism” people, who were out to spread their own version of “democracy” to every gulley, every household, in a decentralized manner” (49). The author’s forte is straightforwardness, and he does not seem to have any interest in obliqueness or irony that often opens up vistas of experience. Nevertheless, he is capable of subtle verbal twists as clear from the innuendo implicit in the remark of the English Professor explaining to his present target Sreelekha the difference between linguistic and literary modes of signification: ‘Linguistics is all about classifying and categorizing the sentences into units. The reality of meaning in a sentence is deciphered through decoding the parts. Likewise the coil (the image in Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake’) can be realized through approaching the parts’ (56).
Short sentences, apposite diction, postcolonial uninhibited use of Bengali terms like anchal, jhulan, karta, buddhu, nagorik, gulley, gamchha, and also addresses and exclamations like ohey, urrey bbabba, chhi chhi, account not only for the easy-reading of the tale but also for its straightforward communication. Except for minor slips (pages 88, 139, 157), the paperback edition is almost angelically free from typo. The cover, designed by Abira Das and detailed with kash, cloud and kite that go with the season in focus, sets the mood of the novel. Published in 2015, 14th August – A Letter is the debut novel of Sutanu Mitra. It is an appetizer; readers may wait for the main course, if not already served.