‘The One Legged’: This Bengali novel in translation is a shocking exploration of children’s psyches

The One Legged is an affecting translation of Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s Bengali novel Ekanore. The translator, Rituparna Mukherjee, evokes the haunting sights, smells and sounds of this fictional world into a new language. Here is a particularly vivid passage:

The sky was turning red, and some of that color splattered over the tip of the palm tree. … When that exultant cry was slaughtering the night alive, blood trickled down the chin of a fractured moon, and the wind bore on its shoulders the odor of burning flesh, turning the reddish mist odorous. Tunu felt that this strange nocturnal smell could permeate his skin and stay with him throughout his life. He didn't see if the embers from the burning had reached the forest … or realise how far the southern sea wind had carried the fire … Someone, turning over the bowl of the sky, poured the melting yolk of a duck egg, which would flow for miles, far away to the depths of the sea.

Perversion of young minds

Though the setting of the novel has an eerie quality, it elicits curiosity more than fear. The book has been classified as “speculative fiction”, but I would prefer to call it a psychological thriller. It is an unsparing,...

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