Realism, surrealism and everything in between Jackie Kabir explores worlds on some stories

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 astonished at the occurrence. Another story, Utshob, is the tale of a husband acquiring a second wife without the permission of his first wife. This is done on the pretext of his wife not being able to give birth to a boy. Before Moijuddi can bring his new bride home Fulmoti, the first wife, takes all her four daughters to the railway station and makes them lie down. This story has a parallel text of verses along with prose, which is unusual in Bengali writing. Most of her other stories are about female sensitivities -- how a woman develops a kind of intimacy with a man while her husband shows little or no interest in her. When the husband finds out about it she is maltreated by him and as result she kind of welcomes death unduly. Such is the subject of her story, Lucifer O Paira Barta.

Meghhin Raat Chhilo Purno Grash Chhad Chhilo is about a little girl working in a house and being sexually molested by the teenage boy of the family night after night. The boy gets up in the middle of the night to collect water for the household as the supply will be exhausted by the time daylight appears. It is an all too common scene where the weak are exploited by the strong. But we also witness the resistance by the weak. As the girl is thrown out by the landlady, she goes to the shelter of a nearby slum dweller. The boy goes to see her and gives some money to her which she leaves at the slum dwellers' bed as she leaves with her baby. That is another way to protest the wrongdoings of the strong and the powerful of society. The narrator here is the boy himself, which makes the story rather interesting. Kamala Dighi, a fable about a queen getting drowned in the lake when the king breaks his vow and wants to be with her. This is the story within the story of Kamalabati, an elderly woman who is gang-raped by some men as she does not allow them to touch her divorced daughter. Like the queen who drowns in the lake, Kamalabati is immersed in the insurmountable pains of her life. That is probably the reason behind the similarity between the names in both stories. It is a feature known as 'intertexuality.'

All of Papri Rahman's stories have female characters as protagonists. She portrays the inhabitants of her tales from every nook and corner of Bangladesh. The dialects she uses are sometimes difficult to understand on the part of an ordinary reader. This reviewer also feels that the writer uses obscure imagery at times. Sometimes the narration jumps from one person to another. Other than that, we see the use of magic realism and elements of folklore in different stories. The complexities of human life are used in an imaginative way, even though the author claims that she does not use any imagination.

In the inner jacket of her book, Papri Rahman maintains that she does not expect her readers to be overwhelmed by the stories nor does she want to be critically acclaimed by reviewers. She mentions all the theories that exist in literature, starting from realism to surrealism to magic to comedy and many more which cannot be easily labeled in the world of literature. She adds that she does not want these stories to be recognized as one or the other. She urges her readers to be the judge of what they find in her stories. Her stories are for the simplest of readers rather than for those who claim to be 'literary canons.'

Jackie Kabir, writer and teacher, is associated with The Reading Circle.