15 SEPTEMBER 2026 On the current pile
You may not immediately recognise Bibhutibhushan by name,
but you may know the story that travelled furthest from his
pages:
পথের পাঁচালী
Pather Panchali
Pather Panchali
,
usually rendered in English as Song of the Road,
and in French as La Complainte du sentier, directed by Satyajit Ray.
What I love about Bibhutibhushan is not simply his eye for rural Bengal. He makes hardship beautiful without making it less hard. Ordinary struggles, family ties, small economies, disappointments and grief acquire enormous emotional weight in his hands.
I grew up in Bankura, a small town in West Bengal, so his village paths, fields, households and small-town rhythms can feel almost too familiar. Sometimes recognition arrives before interpretation. The distance between the page and memory simply disappears.
Anuborton turns that attention towards the teachers of a school in Kolkata during the years of the Second World War. These are poorly paid people with ordinary ambitions, compromises, affections and disappointments. Yet he makes their apparently small lives feel large enough to contain an entire world.
A disgraced professor retreats from one crisis only to find himself confronting another alongside his daughter in post-apartheid South Africa. It is gripping, uncomfortable, and deliberately difficult to settle into.
While reading it, I kept finding Lucy infuriatingly stubborn. Only after I put the book back on the shelf did something bother me about that judgement. I had been reading her, at least partly, through David's frustration with her. The book had managed to leave me questioning both her choices and the position from which I had judged them.
Some books acquire meanings that have very little to do with reviewing them. André Aciman's The Gentleman from Peru is one of mine.
That story can wait for a longer conversation.