‘This Place of Mud and Bone’: A profound novel about erosion of friendships in the face of violence

“The days passed thus.
The nights too.
Time marched on.”

How do we remember a past we’d rather forget? What do we owe the people we grew up with when our lives have changed beyond recognition? This Place of Mud and Bone by Sanjay Bista, translated from the Nepali by Anurag Basnet, is a quiet, powerful novel that explores these questions through the lives of six friends from the village of Labda. Set during and after the Gorkhaland movement of the 1980s, the story follows them over three decades as politics, violence, and memory shape their paths. Some stay, some leave, but none of them remains untouched by the history unfolding around them. The novel doesn’t focus on as much on the details of major events as on how these incidents echo in personal lives – through silence, distance, and the weight of remembering. It’s a story about friendship, loss, and the quiet costs of growing up in a time of conflict.

Brutal inheritance of memory

This is a profound and devastating novel that brings to the surface a region and a resistance often ignored in the broader discourse of Indian literature. Set in and around the Darjeeling hills during the Gorkhaland movement of the 1980s, the novel traces the lives of...

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