A life beyond logic
Name of the book: Jiban Juktira Bahare
Author: Pankaj Thakur
Translator: Mona Lisa Jena
Publisher: Kahani
No. of pages: 164
Price: Rs 125
Depicting a life and an era that defy logic, Pankaj Thakur’s Jiban Juktira Bahare is a series of autobiographical sketches that reveal life’s paradoxical realities.
The translator, Mona Lisa Jena, brings alive all the shades, the landscape, and the uniquely staid yet volcanic life of the Northeast to life.
Thakur’s bittersweet experiences truly go beyond life’s humdrum logic and allow us to expect the unexpected with a little bit of ease.
A student of economics, the author has been a teacher, a journalist and a corporate executive.
Many other sundry occupations have resulted in a mélange of experiences and these diverse experiences have helped him face life’s many-hued experiences and portray them in a series of vivid narratives.
Ellen, The Tiger and I reflects the innocence and raw courage of Ellen, a Naga girl.
Benari Lotha, Manju, Chumang and Others depicts the violent face of the raging unrest in Nagaland in a gripping account.
The Definition of Statistics presents the abject neglect of rural Northeast and exposes the bureaucratic lies responsible for it.
About Three Artistes is a tribute to three great artists of Assam — Benu Mishra, Naal Paban Barua and Pranab Barua — and their humaneness.
There are three episodes involving Mumbai, where the author was a student — Ellie Marcello, Atil Sitkara and I, About Two Hippies and The Parsi Girl.
The episodes are reflections on the twists and turns of human emotion.
The writer is dragged into one experience to merge with another.
The experiences offer great insight into the pliant human mind and its unfathomable machinery.
A sketch about Calcutta, Those Characters in Search of a Story, shows the bonhomie of the common man but after an unfortunate incident, the middle class tattlers float a number of unsavoury theories or stories which hurt the author.
An episode in Madras, in One Bangle, is an unexpected experience the writer faces during a bus journey.
The Python; Arun Basumatary’s Management portrays the skills of Basumatary who had to let loose a python in the courtyard of a warehouse to prevent thieves from stealing motor parts and to keep the security guards on their toes.
However, the narrative stutters at times when the translator treads the perilous path of translating word for word.
Meanings blur at times in a bid to render an exact translation.
At times, words defy sense when perestroika becomes “pestroika” and Larsen and Toubro becomes “Larsen and Tube”.
Matters are compounded when the printer’s devil runs amok and words run into one another.
Ultimately, however, one must acknowledge the translator’s efforts at recreating for us the zeitgeist of the region and the search for identity.
ALIPTA JENA
Published on November 4, 2011
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