Anusua Mukherjee

Dear Reader, Some years ago, I tried translating one of my life’s bibles, Bengali author Lila Majumder’s novel Holde Pakhir Palok (literally, The Yellow Bird’s Feather), for an American friend, to give him an inkling of its extraordinariness. I stumbled at the very second sentence, at the word “nerikutto”. It loosely means stray dog but the meaning is anything that straightforward, for neri derives from nigger, which was the colonialist’s slur for dark-skinned Indians.

Dear Reader, Texts we have read constitute the libraries in our heads and shape us. Then those libraries direct us towards texts that can be appropriate additions to the archives up there. So, when I got an email stating that Aleph is bringing to India Louise Glück’s only published piece of fiction, Marigold and Rose, the librarian in my head immediately sent me a memo asking me to pick it up. Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020.

Dear Reader, My recent trip to Meghalaya yielded a series of surprises. First, there was Shillong, which, in my novel-fuelled imagination, has always been a wee hill town with picturesque bungalows, lonely bends, creeping mists, and constant rain. What I saw instead was a traffic-choked, tourist-stifled, high-rise-defaced metropolis that is expanding rapidly, eating up what is left of the hills in whose folds it is lodged.