the loneliness of hira barua by arupa patangia kalita (may 2021)

published in print for champaca bookstore, for may 2021
the champaca book subscription is a subscription programme by champaca bookstore, wherein carefully curated books are sent to subscribers across india every month, according to a yearly theme. as part of the subscription, the champaca team writes a curation note, contextualising the books we’ve chosen within the yearly theme. these notes are written by one team member each month, but are not personal — they are written in the general voice of the bookstore.

Thank you for subscribing and welcome to our community of book lovers! This year, our Subscription Box contains translations: Indian and international, and across genres, including fiction, essays and poetry.

This month, we’ve sent you The Loneliness of Hira Barua by Arupa Patangia Kalita, translated from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas. Hira Barua won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2014, and was translated into English for the first time in 2020. Biswas’ careful choice of phrases and words bring the text into English in a detailed, poetic translation. 

The fifteen short stories in Hira Barua explore the lives of women during years of agitation in Assam, where decades-long conflicts from the 1970s to today rage between separatist groups and the state government. Stories revolve around the young schoolgirl next door, or the lady everyone affectionately refers to as “bua”. The stories are of ordinary days and ordinary people brought alive with vivid details. But this is an ordinary life in the midst of unavoidable terror, the threat of which skirts on the edges of each story. As the agitation in Assam gains ground, the protagonists of these stories endeavour to carry on with their lives.

Kalita lingers on the minutiae of everyday life. Women make tilpatha and hilsa fish; families carefully tend to torn curtains; an old man plants rows of palm trees at the edge of a pond. With such details, the book focuses on the effect and experience of living in the midst of strife and violence resulting from political conflict on a people, their customs and ways of life.  

Our companion novel is Son of a Thundercloud by Easterine Kire, in which we meet Pele, who loses his family in a famine. Travelling to a new village, he remembers a prophecy he once heard: a single drop of rain will fall on a woman, and she will give birth to the son of the thundercloud, who will grow up to be the saviour of his village. Drawing from Naga legends and blended with Christian myth, Son of a Thundercloud is a moving and magical fable.   

We are so excited to send you a beautifully illustrated bookmark and postcard by Hemlata Pradhan, an award-winning botanical artist from Darjeeling.

We hope you like these books that bring us a small glimpse of the time and culture that they are from, and bring alive some of the lived experiences of Assam and Nagaland.