‘Dukh ki Duniya Bhitar Hai’: In writer Jey Sushil’s memoir, an intimate republic and a sense of loss

The literature of mourning is a curious subgenre. It can easily slip into sentimentality, but the best examples rise above that to reflect on bigger things, society, time, and the fragile bonds that hold families together. Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai, a memoir in Hindi by journalist and writer Jey Sushil, belongs to that rare kind. It is both a deeply personal story of a son grieving his father and a wider reflection on a disappearing way of life in postcolonial India.

This way of life was shaped by ideas of collective work, the respect tied to public sector jobs, political dreams, and simple, honest hopes. It once shaped the lives of millions in India’s industrial towns. As India shifted towards a market-driven and individualistic culture, that world began to fade not through breaking news, but in quiet living rooms and long silences. Sushil’s memoir is one of the few literary attempts in recent memory to document that quiet erosion.

The memoir, written with startling clarity and emotional restraint, revolves around Sushil’s late father, a man born in a small village in north Bihar, who spent much of his working life in the uranium mines of Jadugoda, now in Jharkhand part of the industrial belt that...

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