“The boy had no sooner arrived, people said afterwards, than Balaram had run into the house to look for the Claws.
There were plenty of people gathered outside the big house to vouch for it — boys in buttonless shorts, toothless, shrouded widows, a few men who had not found work for the day, squatting and scratching. Toru-debi threatened and scolded, but not one of them budged. It was not every day that someone new arrived in Lalpukur. Especially in such unusual circumstances.
Years later — thirteen to be exact — when people talked about all that had happened, sitting under the great banyan tree in the centre of the village (where Bhudeb Roy’s life-size portrait had once fallen with such a crash), it was generally reckoned that the boy’s arrival was the real beginning. Some said they knew the moment they set eyes on that head. That was a little difficult to believe. But, still, it was an extraordinary head — huge, several times too large for an eight-year-old, and curiously uneven, bulging all over with knots and bumps.
Someone said: It’s like a rock covered with fungus. But Bolai-da, who had left his cycle-repair shop and chased the rickshaw which was bringing Toru-debi and the boy home from the station, all the way to the house on his bamboo-thin bandy legs, wouldn’t have that. He said at once: No, it’s not like a rock at all. It’s an alu, a potato, a huge, freshly dug, lumpy potato.”
—
This is the story of Alu – a young weaver, suspected to be a terrorist in the aftermath of a bomb blast in his village, is on a run across countries. A debut so engaging, it is hard to fathom this one didn’t carry the distilled wisdom of Amitav Ghosh’s many outings of later years. I didn’t know this book was his first. If you knew, and have read it, you clearly had the pleasure of drinking its fabled magic before me. But no one is complaining; certainly not Alu who outgrew his rotund existence, becoming a juxtaposed canvas of India and her many unmissable shades. Not one but many circles of reason are what I found in this weather-beaten book lying quietly in a cafe I chanced upon.
SEEMITA DAS 