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The word Oshtorombha is in fact zero. It is Papri Rahman's third collection of stories and her fifth book. Papri Rahman carries the banner of a writer, an editor and a critic, quite comfortably. She doesn't write about the issues related to women which we commonly see in other contemporary writers, as she claims. Whenever she finds a story that is out of the ordinary, she tries to colour it in the canvass of story telling. This makes her somewhat different from other female writers that we come across. The book Oshtorombha has eight stories, six of which are in a rural setting; and the remaining two are narrated from an urban point of view. One of the stories, Shodh, depicts how a village woman takes revenge on her husband's second wife by urinating on her bed. It is a tempestuous night when the first wife is given shelter at their place. Everything is going on as usual, except that when she leaves the bed it is wet with a pungent smell. Both Hasna and Mohor Ali were asto...

Mircae Eliade's famous book La Nuit Bengali was translated into Bangla by Shoshodhor. The book was originally written by a famous Romanian author and philosopher Mircea Eliade in 1933. La Nuit Bengali meaning The Bengali Night by Mircea Eliade acted as the catalyst for Maitreyi Devi to write her version of the same story. Even though there was a deal between both the writers that Mircea's book would not be translated into English in either of their lifetimes, it was made into a movie in 1988. This made Maitreyi very upset and she even filed a lawsuit against the making of the film. She complained that it had misrepresented Indian culture and their religion. One cannot help but think that La Nuit Bengali is more like reading someone's personal diary. It gives the feeling of authentic real-life occurrences as all the characters share the names of the real-life people. The magical description of Calcutta in the 1930s and its surroundings makes the reader travel back in time a...