Popular Facebook posts that became an exceptional novel, Ismail Darbesh’s ‘Talashnama: The Quest’

Rajesh Sharma

The marginal achieves the magnitude of the epic in this 562-page debut Bengali novel of Ismail Darbesh. It originated in the form of Facebook posts which found immense traction with Bengali readers. It took the shape of a book in 2021 when Abhijan Publishers of Kolkata published it. It has now become available in English in V Ramaswamy’s exquisite translation.
The novel fictionally documents a rich portion of the social reality of rural Bengal, a reality at once quaint and contemporary. A mosque in Sadnahati, a village in Howrah district, is the beating heart of that social reality.
The paradox of the quaint but contemporary underlines the unevenness of lived time across different social spaces, and undoes the comfortable political fictions of universal progress and monochromatic modernity. The effort to put it all on a single canvas obviously required the writer to look far and observe closely. The result is a novel in which history bleeds into the present and the political colours the personal fatefully. In lesser hands, such a vision could have produced cynicism and blustering certainty. In Darbesh’s fresh yet sensitive hands, it inspires subtle humour — an amused observer’s mordant, forgiving humour that reminds you of Chaucer.
At the centre of the novel, and in the storm’s eye, is Reziya, an orphan who eloped with a Hindu man who has now killed himself. But the story is not only hers. She is the radiant glue holding together many tales. Love, suicide, reason, belief, rebellion, idealism, disappointment, self-doubt, intrigue, ambition, modernity, tradition, choices fatally warped — all meet, clash or crumble in an intricately plotted narrative which changes pace as spontaneously as an improvised oral tale. Neither does the narrative run straight on. It opens, then goes back, branches off, and has tributaries flowing in. The chips are falling everywhere and the beans are being spilled, the reader feels, until every chip and each bean turns out to have been the piece of a puzzle. Reading the novel, I thought of Marquez’s ‘Chronicles of a Death Foretold’, in which the end is told at the outset and yet the story holds you in an unrelenting, moving grip.
Darbesh’s structuring of spaces, time, events and characters does not at all suggest that this is his debut novel. It has a simple-seeming complexity that usually distinguishes the fictional art of the masters. The narrative seems to be flowing on its own, even rambling. The reason might be its birth on Facebook. It has the feel of a serialised novel: the dramatically alternating pace, the abundance of “happenings”, new characters and places popping into the narrative — things that will keep the story alive and breathing and running. So, in its final shape and design, this comprehensive, keen, organised ramble steals your admiration in spite of yourself. You can find no loose ends.
And yet the whole is intrepidly ambiguous, as good literary fiction is supposed to be. It doesn’t offer the consolation of false certainties, only the perturbation of questions. The kind of questions Tahirul sees in Reziya’s eyes: “The tranquil but deep look in her eyes seemed to express so many questions, from so many centuries.” Clearly, these are not easy to answer. The reader must make his own journey, however arduous. The writer hands him no maps in black and white, only a magic slate. The ambiguity suffuses the questions of politics and religion too. Like patriarchy’s conventions, orthodox customs and political identities receive hard scrutiny that dissolves their habitually perceived boundaries. “Mama, it’s correct,” Reziya says, “that Suman didn’t become a Muslim, but he could never be a Hindu either. Perhaps I too couldn’t become a Muslim like you all, although I was born in a Muslim household.” Darbesh obviously has no use for reductive simplifications. He knows that reality — political, religious, or private — is complex and defiantly ambiguous. Reziya knows it in her bones. She doubts if we can even give ourselves fully to love. This degree of aching lucidity would make any character immortal. It makes the novel unforgettable.
Yet one wishes the characters had more inward life and the narrative that flows, twists, turns and returns also cut deeper. The truth this brilliant novel had the potential to seek would then have overflowed the constraints of social realism and enlarged reality itself.