Footpaths In All Cities are the Same

Lakshmi Kannan reviews The Dead Fish written by Rajkamal Chaudhary .Translated into English by Mahua Sen: 

Good news. When Cassandras of language are lamenting about books that are “lost in translation”, here is a classic that is “found” in translation.

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The Dead Fish is one of those books disturbing books in which the central protagonist is not very likeable, or even relatable. Yet, one continues to read it despite reservations about the improbable theme and the protagonists, both male and female. The book grows on you, or could it be a strange fascination that draws us to perversion, sadism, or masochism, despite our initial response?

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Another motivating factor to reading the book is the beauty of Mahua Sen’s diction, the way she moves her pen through this daunting task of translating a very difficult novel with courage and conviction. Thanks to her lucid translation, we get to read the controversial novel Macchali Maari Hui, which is considered as a classic by Rajkamal Choudhury.  

 

Mahua Sen is an accomplished poet and translator who has received several prestigious awards that include the Reuel International Poetry Prize, the Poet of the Year (2022) and the prestigious Maharshi Ved Vyas International Award for Poetry (2024) for Nostalgia: Crafting a Home Within (Red River).

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The author Rajkamal Choudhary (1929-67), known as an iconic literary figure in Hindi and Maithili, blazed a trail with his experimental style and content. He was perhaps one of the earliest writers in Hindi to address same sex issues from a neutral stance, sharing valuable insights from his research within the structure of his novel.

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The book is interspersed with poetic touches, and his use of double entendre, features that may have appealed to the poet in Mahua Sen. ‘I wanted the English readers to encounter the same ambiguity, emotional intricacy and cultural richness that Hindi readers have long admired in his work,’ she says in her Translator’s Note (xii).  Anamika, the renowned poet and novelist in Hindi and Sahitya Akademi award winner remarks: ‘Howsoever famous writers may be in the public sphere of their own mother tongue, they enter the city space of a new linguistic culture almost like an orphan. This orphan, like a dazed child, walks quietly behind the translation artist who plays the godmother at every step. She (Mahua Sen) is friends with the text, responsible and sensitive to the core. Those who have read Rajkamal in the original will appreciate this.’

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And Malashri Lal, a distinguished poet and critic in English, and a former Professor of English, University of Delhi who knows her Calcutta like only a Bengali by birth would, says Sen’s translation ‘not only evokes the mid-20th century Calcutta, but also invades the space of current discussion on sexuality, social hierarchy and systemic corruption. With finesse, the translator uses a calibrated vocabulary to painting shades of meaning and catch the idioms.’

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Selecting a powerful, challenging text for her debut translation, Sen remarks that Choudhury’s fiction, much like his poetry, is ‘layered, lyrical, multifarious and rich in imagery…retaining the same poetic sensibility’ (xi). She further finds a powerful metaphor in the image of the Dead Fish that ‘stands for loss, decay, emotional stagnations and the slow withering of vitality, both in relationships and in the human spirit’ (xii).  

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With the innate conscience of a writer, Sen scrupulously adheres to not just the structure of the original novel, but equally the unique features of his storytelling by ‘preserving Choudhury’s idiosyncratic poetic metronome throughout the story’ (xi). So it is that we get a fictional trope transformed into a metronome whenever Nirmal Padmavat’s memory harks back to the painful image of himself as a small boy of ten in a village in North Bihar, whose father dies, and his mother not only abandons him to elope with a lorry driver, but sells off the ancestral house, rendering him homeless. ‘Nirmal didn’t feel sorrow for his mother’s departure; instead, the pain stemmed from the sale of the family home…the perplexing question remained – why did she take the house with her?’ This haunts the reader as much as it does Padmavat. ‘After running away from his village, Nirmal went straight to Karachi. From Karachi to Lahore. He earned his livelihood by washing dishes in a Muslim hotel in Sialkot’. (37)

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His failed relationships with women- starting with Kalyani, her daughter Priya and Shirin – shows him to be a somewhat maimed man who often resorts to violence, as in the case of young Priya. Perhaps the early trauma of losing a mother, however much he was in denial about the loss, disabled him for love. Equally, women are unable to even like him, let alone love.

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Surprisingly, ‘He yearns for his mother. He wishes for her to come back someday and ask him for a house to live in. For a place to rest. And he would then offer this Kalyani Mansion. A massive thirty-storied skyscraper!’ (pp.146-47). And several pages later, toward the end of the novel, Sen returns to the same metaphor when Padmavat, who had immense wealth, ponders: ‘He had never tried to decipher the workings of the society he inhabited. Today he has the time after so many years. It is because he is back on the footpath once again…he has had an old association with footpaths. Karachi’s footpath, Bombay’s footpath, New York, Washington, Cairo, Calcutta’s footpath. He knew them all. There is no difference in footpaths of different places, for footpath in all cities are the same.’ (170-71)

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In that huge Kalyani Mansion, no one seems to be happy. Dr. Raghuvansh, Kalyani’s husband and Priya’s father, pens a hand-written letter to Padmavat that is given in a different font. Some of his lines resonate with a quiet, disconcerting profundity: ‘Why did you put that old and broken necklace around Priya’s neck? Do you also have a flair for the dramatics like mediocre men? Melodrama?’

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‘You remained a beast,’ he declares. ‘You couldn’t be a normal human being…There is no greater happiness than being a normal human being, Nirmal. …It is not more difficult to be abnormal than to be extraordinary…But it is mighty difficult to be ordinary. It is punishing to keep your lifestyle bound to simplicity and mediocrity.’ (155)

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Padmavat remained a beast to Dr. Raghuvansh and a devil to Vishwajeet Mehta, Shirin’s erstwhile husband. The two allegations are easy to agree with. Yet, there are contrary shades in Padmavat’s personality. He could suddenly melt for the young, twenty-year old Pratap, a rich heir to a zamindar, who looked too youthful, fresh and vulnerable in the presence of the seductive Kalyani. ‘How young, how humble this boy is, how gentle! Why are you spoiling him?’ he asks her.  

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Mahua Sen made a cognizant choice in selecting this novel for translation. It is a challenge she faces bravely, and successfully with her skills in the use of language and the conscience of a poet.

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If it is forgivable for a reviewer to bring in a personal detail, she chose to translate the controversial novel Marappasu by T. Janakiraman as Wooden Cow (Orient Blackswan, 2021, c1979). The iconoclastic Tamil writer offers two flawed protagonists in this novel- a musical genius who flouts all morality with his live-in partner Ammani, a woman who lives defiantly.  Years later, Janakiraman nodded graciously when told his novel is written with a ‘male gaze’. Both the phrase and the author had grown with time.