Arupa Patangia Kalita’s The Loneliness of Hira Barua

Parbina Rashid

Fifteen women characters, forced to deal with the challenges that life throws at them. Pitted against patriarchy, political turmoil and human brutality that Assam has been witnessing over the past few decades, these characters have little choice but to bear the unbearable and silently, yet resiliently, assert themselves.

Time has not been kind to Assam and Arupa Patangia Kalita, a politically conscious writer, has captured this unkind time in its different hues in her anthology of short stories, ‘The Loneliness of Hira Barua’. The stories have been translated into English from Kalita’s Sahitya Akademi award-winning Assamese book ‘Mariam Austin Othoba Hira Barua’ by Ranjita Biswas.

“What do I write? I write about what I see around me, about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the river I see, the flowers I smell, the times where I stand, the folk traditions in which I grew up, the history that I live in,” said Kalita in one of her interviews. True, one finds the earthiness of Assam in all her stories.

Take, for instance, Mainao from ‘The Girl with the Long Hair.’ A happy-go-lucky Bodo teenager who finds pleasure in simple things like weaving her own dokhona, decking up on occasions and going out with friends faces the trauma of losing her long hair for defying the diktat of an extremist group.

Then there is Nibha bou, who looks on helplessly as some surrendered extremists and the Army ramshackle her house searching for a missing member of the family. And then there is Suagmoni’s mother, a storyteller, whose tale about an ogress remains incomplete as her daughter goes to school to celebrate Independence Day but never returns — killed in a bomb blast. Of course, there is Hira Barua who talks to her pet dog. She reminds herself of the old and lonely Mariam Austin about whom she had heard from her London-based uncle.

Weaving folklore, folk songs and rituals in her stories, Kalita gives voice to these women whose cries fade away before they reach where they must. Whatever the form of her prose , the emotion that comes across is raw. That’s the beauty of Kalita’s writing.