Bani Basu The Fifth Man (epub)

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.BANI BASUThe Fifth ManTranslated from the Bengali by Arunava SinhaRANDOM HOUSE INDIACONTENTSA Note on the AuthorA Note on the TranslatorOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenTwelveThirteenFourteenFifteenSixteenSeventeenEighteenNineteenTwentyFollow Random HouseCopyrightA NOTE ON THE AUTHORBani Basu is arguably the most versatile contemporary writer in Bengali, the broad range of her fiction deals with gender, history, mythology, society, psychology, adolescence, music, sexual orientation, the supernatural, and more.Besides writing novels and short stories, she is also an essayist, critic and poet.She has won a number of literary awards, including the Sahitya Akademi award.She lives and writes in Calcutta.A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATORArunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English.Twenty-eight of his translated works have been published so far.Born and brought up in Calcutta, he lives and works in Delhi.ToDurgadas ChattopadhyayONEAritra had woken up after a strange dream, recovering slowly in a room suffused by blue light.The curtains at the head of his bed were drawn.Like a torrent of water impeded by boulders, the street light had rushed in through the opening, and the blue night-lamp had faded.The blue of the earthly sky.In the dead of night, his sparsely-furnished room had silently merged in its entirety with the external world.The room was no longer recognizable as a room, its six walls seemed to have fallen away.There was only a white strip on the window near the head.The entire western wall was an eagle with unfurled wings.More wide open windows.A desolate emptiness and the sense of an enormous expanse.Not the room but the world, not the world but the sky when it is blue.The sky itself.Uniting sleep and wakefulness, dream and reality.Was it a night of strong winds? And so, formless dreams had arrived at the junction between sleep and oblivion.The night wind had separated the physical Aritra from the mental one, overcoming space-time.Somewhere between deep and light slumber, something moved in a flash from ignorance to knowledge, like a bolt of lightning, before it disappeared.Some dreams are clear remnants of certain wishes, fears, rages and desires.Tamarind seeds used for indoor games were scattered across the terrain of consciousness.But this wasn’t that sort of dream.Someone had appeared, to say something.Sleep had no ears.So it had to be said through visual symbols.Now light sleep and wakefulness were celebrating their union.Listening to the cries of triumph, Aritra felt he was much taller than his six foot frame.His feet had stretched to where the sun sets in the west, his arms were exploring the eastern horizon, getting longer and longer.His memory and identity had expanded many, many miles beyond the limits of the past and the future.His mental self floated in an ocean of space with no compass points.So wakefulness was the real state of sleep.Only one tiny cell remained animate.And sleep was an awakened state of the consciousness.Where one could find oneself, but only after losing oneself in a huge explosion.Aritra couldn’t locate his limbs when he woke up.Only the sense of ‘I am Aritra’ dangled loosely somewhere near his mind.At any other time he would have been afraid.Especially since he had been close to literally losing his legs in a terrifying scooter accident.But Aritra was not frightened.He was perfectly aware that he was neither lying on a road in Shivajinagar with twisted limbs, nor unable to regain consciousness after his surgery at Sassoon Hospital.Only if he could maintain this fearless state would he be able to recognize in its entirety the momentary dream that had flashed in the deepest recess of his sleep, taking the form of a ghostly cuneiform script before vanishing.Only then would he able to retrieve it.Nannyah pantha vidyate.There is no other path to eternal life.Therefore Aritra closed his eyes again.In case he could go back to sleep, that sleep which was really awakening [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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