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A fine new Kolkata novel

Isobel Shirlaw
In his novel Silverfish Saikat Majumdar (HarperCollins India; 2007) weaves together intimate tales of Calcutta life, the protagonists of which are loosely bound by a collective devotion to words.
We follow Milan, a retired schoolteacher and professor as he ambles around the streets of a contemporary Calcutta ruled under a Communist government. Waylaid from time to time by pot-smoking Westerners seeking apparitions in the fish markets or by angry students protesting against the IMF, he realises that although he 'dabbled with Marxism' in his youth, he has lost most of it. Instead, he is on a simple quest to collect his pension — a pension that shrunk noticeably under Communist rule, and one that appears to be shrinking further and further into the distance with every hurdle of government bureaucracy that he is forced to overcome.
But it is in Milan's head that Majumdar's real story is playing out. Weary of his own attempts to write, Milan has become immersed in the narrative of one quite unbeknown to him -- a widow named Kamal who spent her life cloistered in the 'tall, proud mansion of one of the noblest families in [nineteenth-century] Bengal'.
Kamal's lyrical words interrupt Milan’s reality like blocks of blue through the cloud. They are of a ghostly quality, Kamal, herself, is never quite there -- we are left only with her words on the frayed sheaves' of cotton that Milan carries around like a treasure. And this absence of character accentuates the language in which Majumdar has conjured her. It is the process of reading, of writing, that is granter greater significance than the stories themselves.
At the time of Kamal's husband's death, the custom of burning widows is petering out, and the new custom - of subjecting widows to a living death -- is growing more fashionable. Heads are shorn, vermilion scrubbed out and the luxurious red-bordered saris of the brides are replaced with the coarse white sacks of the widows.
Kamal realises that she has spent almost her whole life stuck behind the lion gates of her husband's house. Her limited view allows only a patch of sky and the grand marble courtyard. The descriptions are repetitive — we too are confined to her claustrophobic existence in the women's quarters. And gradually, in reaction against death, she chooses to liberate her “time-chained mind” and learns to read, letting "words rain down on the desert of (her) life."
To Majumdar, words are almost supernatural -- they shape our identity, our history and they fend off death. For what is history other than a collection of different people s lives - different voices - different stories? As Milan brushes the dust from the ancient manuscript, he uncovers lost memories -- the "decades that no-one had known to pass, the miracle of a century.”
The metaphor of the silverfish is persistent — curling its way through Majumdar's pages - through Milan's mind - for the silverfish, too, "lives off books." There is a touching portrait of a lowly magazine stall owner named Moidul -- the man who had first discovered Kamal's story. Moidul had sold all his family's jewellery to make his shop work, and it was stocked high with everything, from obscure cricket journals to antique pornography. For everything he did was “born of a muted love for the written word.” It appears that Majumdar shares Moidul's iove; it is the engine for his creativity, and the very same ( love that has brought this fine new novel to light.