Inventive and mysterious world of literary writings by Sabarna Roy
Sabarna Roy, in his own words, is not a trained author. He is a natural author with a flair for intriguing post-modern, urban characters and circumstances located in and around Calcutta/Kolkata and he writes his narrative in a sparkling lucid language devoid of adverbs and adjectives and remarkably with very appropriate use of articles. He delves deep into the psyche of each character and completes meticulous detailing of circumstances to bring out the truth of events and at the same time remaining unbiased towards his characters because, he says, he does not look into any phenomenon as a conflict between an alleged perpetrator versus an alleged victim.
He flips from one genre to another genre, and even within a chapter of a story and seamlessly welds them together to elaborate his point of view.
He has written five books till date. His first book was Pentacles that consists of a long story and four long narrative poems. The long story, titled: 'New Life' is written in a novellic manner, which is essentially an author’s dictation on philosophical views intertwined with the narrative around the protagonist, who was abandoned by his mother at an early stage of his life for the love of another man. The long narrative poems, namely, The Tower, 2001-2002, Chasing and Tara are full of strange and unique stories, made up of surrealism and magic realism.
Frosted Glass is Sabarna Roy’s second book and this consists of one story cycle comprising fourteen long-short stories and one poem cycle comprising twenty-one lyrical narrative poems.
The stories, set in Calcutta, bring to the fore the darkness lurking in the human psyche and bare the baser instincts. The stories, compactly written and marked by insightful dialogues that raise contemporary issues like man-woman relationships and its strains, morals and ethics, environmental degradation, class inequality, rapid and mass-scale unmindful urbanization, are devoid of sentimentalisation. The result is they remain focused and move around the central character who is named Rahul in all the stories. We encounter the events that shape, mar, guide Rahul’s life and also the lives of those around him, making us question the very essence of existence. Rahul symbolises modern man; he is not just one character, but all of us rolled into one. The story cycle stands out for two reasons – its brilliant narrative and the dispassionate style with which betrayal in personal relationships and resultant loneliness has been handled.
The poems weave a maze of dreams, images, reflections and stories. They are written in a reflective and many a time in a narrative tenor within a poetic idiom. The poems are inseparable in a hidden way and are magically sequenced like various kinds of flowers in a garland or chapters of differing shades in a novel. Calcutta features in some of the poems like the looming backdrop of Gotham City in a Batman movie.
