September fiction: Six new novels that bring stories from a city’s underbelly and beyond the planet

The Interloper, Manoranjan Byapari, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy

A youth walks into the Jadavpur railway station. Very soon, the denizens there – liquor vendors, rickshaw drivers, squatters, beggars, ragpickers, pickpockets – recognise him as Jibon, the daring young man who had done them many a good turn. And those who were certain he had perished in a deadly bomb blast in the city’s red-light area are astounded.

His memory lost, this Jibon finds himself a stranger to his own self. But he quickly learns to play the role of a man whose past allegiance to the Naxalites was marked by bloodshed. This is the Calcutta of the early 1970s, a time when a man with a stone prowls the streets after midnight, crushing the heads of homeless folk. It is a city where upper-caste refugees from the Bengal across the border have become affluent, even as their low-caste, poor compatriots have lost everything. Women are swindled and brutalised with alarming frequency here; orphans are kidnapped from public places and trafficked. The Congress party rules the roost, the ultra-reds have been finished, and the reds struggle to survive.

Jadavpur’s Jibon knows he’s an unnecessary creature in this “Saare Jahan Se Achcha” country. He is...

Read more