GARIAHAT JUNCTION - Acknowledgement
Everything
in my life can be traced to my late mother - Kalpana Basu Roy - including my
fiction. The long “back story” of my fiction writing has a lot to do with her –
with her instilling in me a fascination for sto
Though
I have read fiction all my life and dreamt of being an author ever since my
college days, I gave priority to my academic ambitions and the business of
earning a living in my twenties, starting to write fiction only in 2005. The
incentive came in the form of a creative writing workshop with Amitav Ghosh and
co-conducted by Prof. Rimi B. Chatterjee at Jadavpur University in Kolkata,
which I greatly enjoyed being a part of and learnt a lot from, the principal
lesson being that I can
write fiction! It was a turning point in my life and I am indebted to that
workshop for bringing it about.
Years
later, in another life in a different continent, I would do another – with Amal
Chatterjee and Jane Draycott in Amsterdam, in 2013. The first had started off
my fiction writing; this other gave me the impetus to complete my collection of
shorts, Gariahat Junction.
In between, thanks to the irrepressible Dipika Mukherjee, I became part of a
writing group in Amsterdam (Mezrab, Zolder, Genre Fiction Group and The Write
Club being its various avatars), which helped me immensely in writing my
fiction.
I
am indebted to the members of the groups for their critique, their friendship
and solidarity, without which the experience of writing would have been so much
harder for me. Eric Asp, Tori Egherman, Anna Heldring, Dina Nayeri, Arturo
Desimone, Christopher Saxe, David Lee, Smruthy Sachidanandan, Barbara Austin, Jackie
Hatton, Karen Kao, Mark Bruinekreeft - you have each helped me in ways you were
not always aware of. I am also very grateful to a small band of loyal readers
among my family and friends, whose encouragement has meant a lot to me. I would
like to especially mention Nilanjana Ray, Bhagwathi Rao Sandilya, Sanjay
Sandilya, Bratati Raybardhan, Gargyee Roy, Srinka Bose, Brototi Das Gupta, Jaya
Sarma and Barnita Bagchi.
A special thanks goes to Kunal Basu for
being an inspiration and a role-model for me for over a decade.
Gariahat Junction
is a collection of ten short stories; its title a symbolic nod at the fact that
most of the protagonists in this collection have reached a critical juncture in
their lives. I wrote these stories because I felt deeply compelled to write
them. They are drawn from my own life and that of women close to me; women I
have loved, admired, cherished, been influenced by and empathized with. Words
fail to express how grateful I am to them for their generosity in allowing me
to write fictional accounts of their lives, for baring their souls to me and
trusting me with my renditions of them. I was drawn to the longing and
loneliness in their tales, to their poignant failures and un-fulfilments and to
their continuing struggle of being torn between the contrary pulls of ambition
and tradition in their (postmodern) lives, themes that strongly resonated with
my own. 
Gariahat Junction
is not only about women, but also a place: Kolkata. The city where I was born,
brought up, studied, taught, married; the city I had left and have now returned
to after a decade, the city that has shaped me and my sensibility to a profound
extent. How do you thank a city? Acknowledge its integral presence in your life
and your very being? The answer is simple – by writing about it! I am a
middle-class Bengali woman from Kolkata and the world that I depict is also
(primarily) that of middle-class Bengali women of my generation, in or from
Kolkata: even when they live abroad, their stories have an important Kolkata
connection. Kolkata itself, thus, becomes a significant character in this
collection, one of the threads that hold the stories together.
This slim book took
an inordinately long time in the making. That is a story in itself, with too
many twists and turns. That it finally managed to have a happy ending is due to
Zafar Anjum, who, as Director of Kitaab, has valaintly championed short story
collections for many years now and accepted mine as well. I thank him for
giving my maiden book of fiction a home. And I am very grateful to Pallavi
Narayan, without whom this would not have happened! I owe my final thanks to my
friend, Arindam Dasgupta, for designing the cover of the book.
I wrote Gariahat Junction (in fits and starts)
in one of the most challenging and eventful decades of my life. Its high points
were, thankfully, creative ones – two academic books, and my daughter, Srishti!
I am grateful to both: the books for teaching me the discipline that is essential
for writing and for boosting my confidence as a writer; and my daughter, for
giving me renewed hope and faith in life, and a joy I hadn’t known before. I
dedicate this book to her, hoping she will fly with unfettered wings.
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