Book Review

Santosh Kumar Ghosh (in Bengali)
Shesh Namaskar (The Last Salute)
(Bengali Title: Shesh Namaskar - Sricharaneshu Maa ke)
Trns. by: Ketaki Datta
Novel
New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 2013
ISBN 978-81-260-3338-6
Pages 401 | Price Rs 250

A ruminating and cathartic bildungsroman in epistolary mode

"Is this a biography? Some readers wanted to know when this book was being published serially," says Santosh Kumar Ghosh (1920-1985) in the Introduction to his Bengali original, and adds: "If a biography is just a collection of authentic incidents of someone's life, then my answer is 'no.' But, a little sorrow, a few feelings, some quests, a bit of realisation – that too, can form Life! Let us consider a morning. How much of it is light, and how much again is moist shadow? They can't be told apart. They remain entwined with each other. Perhaps, it happens in this writing too."

"Shesh Namaskar is the story of a young man, basically innocent but now gone astray. In his ruthless search for a meaning of life, there is a sadness that both ennobles and elevates the mind," says the blurb. It "is written in the form of a series of letters from a son to his mother who had left home never to return, when the son had accused her of being unfaithful when he was younger. Through these letters he finds way of discovering his own self. As a last tribute of reverence, he seeks forgiveness from his mother just before his death."

Published in 1971, the Bengali novel won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972. The epistolary novel with its second-person narrative has been translated by Ketaki Datta, well-known critic, creative writer and a translator. A PhD in English, having done her thesis on Black and Non-Black Shades of Tennessee William, she is an Associate Professor of English at Bidhannagar College, Kolkata. Her debut novel A Bird Alone has been acclaimed in India and abroad. She has also translated the novel Paadi by Jarasandha into English in 2008.

Though epistolary in nature, the novel is not a string of letters in a strict sense of the letter format for we have only the essential body of the letter and not the other features. Containing all the attributes of a novel – description, narration, dialogues and incidents – the treatment is almost seamless.

Every minute experience of the childhood time that he spent with his mother and thereafter is faithfully and graphically portrayed. The details are so minute and elaborate as to give an impression that the protagonist-narrator has, by some scientific phenomenon, wound back to the advent of his childhood and from there moved forward in a slow motion. The story, set in the backdrop of the Freedom Movement wherein his father was a zealous participant, is spread on a wide canvas of feelings and emotions and experiences through thick and thin.

"All the lucid gruel" has been poured into the book so that it can be "a bit syrupy, a little juicy, otherwise none would take any interest in going through it" (2).

"Tied to 'many' by bonds of desire, hatred, hope, despair, customs, rituals and even gratitude!" (2), the protagonist clarifies that his outpourings can be called anything. "You can call it my query, my reply, my complaint to a person, my umbrage articulated to a person – anything – but this is, no doubt, my last testament, my ultimate settlement with life" (2). Well, what happens if he doesn't make a "final settlement" with life? "I might not be blessed with a rebirth" or "a dissatisfied soul would return in the form of a ghost!" (3).

Looking into the past through the prism of the present invests the childhood past with a kind of quaint old-world charm. The protagonist loves to treasure all those memories even "in this ill-matched age" (8). They were the days "when twenty years had been the yardstick of stamping a maid as an aged one! (7). He regrets that the values of the good old world are fast changing: "Elderly persons should be respected – such teachings were in the core of our being, deep inside. These days we hardly come across anyone bowing at someone's feet. Perhaps the custom will be obsolete soon" (11).

The novel is laced with humour, sizzling scenes, scintillating and racy dialogues. There is even black humour what with a streak of morbid tendency or psyche in the protagonist. Admits he: "If the patient did not die, if death got deferred, in the least, I used to go back home, utterly dejected, frustrated" (9).

Now an instance of hilarity…

When Sudhir Mama snored while dozing on the chair, the two tufts kept quivering. I felt a tickle of laughter at the bottom of my belly. So many times I called you to have a look at it! A little noise marred his sleep, as he used to snooze sitting on the chair! He used to sit up straight then and blink and say, "Hey, what are you looking at?" However, he was quick to follow the direction of my gaze and get the matter! He would hold the two strands up straight and firm and comment, "Oh, you mean these ones! Come take a close look, a lot many are here, a dense forest. Where this nose he extended itself, none knows! None has entered it, to come back and report. Pathless deep woods, quadruped-infested, inhabited by tribal people brandishing bows and arrows or…" With a curt smile, Sudhir Mama used to add, "One could even run into hermits, deeply engrossed in meditation" (13).

The protagonist's father is a committed Freedom Fighter. How an activist deeply involved in a movement would feel restless when there is a break or interregnum in it, we can see: "Now, the movement has also come to a standstill, after the Gandhi-Irwin pact. I think it was better to be a revolutionary" (107).

Feminine instinct of jealousy where their beauty is compared with others stands captured well:

Bhamati was dark, and Leela aunty was fair, she might even be fairer than you. Or, as she used to doll herself up prettily, and daub some kind of cream on her face, she seemed a little fairer than you. You flew into a rage, when I told you so one day. You were twisting your hair into a knot, with the mirror in front of you, the black ribbon pressed between your teeth, and twisting your neck, you said, "One morning, ask that Leela aunty to come and stand beside me after washing her face – make sure that the white cream is not there. Then, it will be seen who is more…" she stopped short, as the ribbon slipped from her mouth…

You used to say, "She is a shameless woman. And she has made her daughter into a tomboy too. You should not mix with them."

Why were you envious of them? (127-128).

The novel has its sprinkling of titillating scenes, truisms of life, teasing moments and racy dialogical sallies. And here is an example of the last ingredient:

I was getting to know Calcutta like the back of my palm, gradually, but it was not so with you. You could not come to terms with the habit of walking with sandals on, by any means.

Father used to tease, "You are still the rustic villager!"

You: "Did you think that I'll become a city-bred fairy overnight?"

Father: "Then go, wearing marks of sandal, take a dip in the Ganga daily, like the old hags."

You: "Yes, do I must. I'll go and get drowned in the Ganga, some day. Show me the way to it, please."

Father: "Straightaway, if you walk facing the west, it is not even half a mile."

Such obnoxious bandying of words went on. (125).

The novel has its poetic flashes and striking imagery. Just a couple of examples… Of a winter day, we have it like this:

Look at the wintry day, it fades out in a jiffy, just as the sudden closure of the lid of an iron-safe fraught with gold and other valuables. (3)

To denote how the dead and gone float into his memory, see what the protagonist says:

As I am stirring an old, weedy, hyacinth-ridden pond, dead and stale fish are floating up one after another (11).

On the whole, this story has a cathartic touch. The gradual progression of the development of the protagonist's character which is in a stream of consciousness mode reminds us of the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. The term 'the curve of an emotion' applied by Joyce to his work equally applies to Shesh Namaskar.

If the object of translation is to showcase an innovative beauty of Bengali fiction to the English reading public, Ketaki Datta has achieved it, for the reading is smooth, the flow is placid, and the language impeccable. And she has thoughtfully and succinctly supplied the explanation of necessary Bengali terms then and there in the text.