There’s Gunpowder in the Air

By Anita Nair

There is always the fear that the book will not live up to the writer. A fear that is several times enhanced if one is a writer herself.

As a writer, I know all the masks writers are capable of donning. I know how a writer will use selfdeprecating wit to let you know how highly the writer actually regards her own work. I know the righteous indignation writers are capable of summoning to deflect how privileged most of our lives are. I know that a writer’s persona whether she be reticent, or expansive is absolutely no indication of what she writes about and how she writes it. I know how to catch the inflections of words and the nuance of a pause. And so, I tend to stay away from writers because I don’t want how I feel about the person colouring how I read their books.

Amidst the guests at a lit-fest party in early 2020, I saw a prickle of writers around a table. With them was a man with a gamcha around his neck. There was something about his demeanour. This was a man who knew he was out of place. And he made no effort to belong. He looked around him taking in the tinkle of glasses, the spurts of laughter and the multiple parties within the party. And then his chin would drop and he would suddenly retreat into himself. I wondered what he was thinking as his gaze swept around and what was playing out in his mind as he stared at the ground. I wondered who he was and what he wrote about.

At the table, I discover this is Manoranjan Byapari. The Bengali writer with 26 books and whose life would make a great biopic (OTT platforms, queue up please). A poor, illiterate Dalit, Byapari learnt to read and write when he was 24 and in jail. Eventually, the case against him was dismissed. He became a rickshaw puller with a hunger for books. A chance encounter with Mahasweta Devi changed all that.

Later that evening I asked Byapari who his influences were and his answer even though it sounded practised carried the hallmark of a discerning reader: From Mahasweta Devi he learnt rage; from Srilal Shukla, his perspective; from Jajabar, his deftness with words and from Samaresh Basu, his heart.

It isn’t often that a writer names his role-models with such candid ease and while his child-like directness touched me, it made me speculate if his writing would be a mere hybrid of all he admired. In hindsight, my own obtuseness appals me. For I let his book There’s Gunpowder in the Air stay on my Books-to-Read shelf until last week. Meanwhile, he has had two more books translated into English and is a sitting MLA from the Balagarh constituency in West Bengal.

Dear Reader, all I will say is that Manoranjan Byapari is a writer you must read. If not in Bengali, then definitely in English. Brilliantly translated by Arunava Sinha, Bypari’s writing sings with truth and the edginess of experience. The style itself is crisp and not given to lyrical excess. Like the two other prison novels I love - The Carpenter’s Pencil by Manuel Rivas and The Kiss of the Spiderwoman by Manuel Puig - this one takes us seamlessly into a world we know relatively nothing about and keeps us there, as enraptured as horrified. In all honesty, I can’t think of many writers who can do this with the élan Byapari does. And that’s his signature, hard to ignore or miss.

Anita Nair is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of the novels The Better Man, Ladies Coupé, Mistress, Lessons in Forgetting, Idris: Keeper of the Light and Alphabet Soup for Lover