Sankar (Mani Sankar Mukherji) is one of Bengal’s most widely read novelists in recent times. This moving story set in Calcutta of the 1970s talks of the city teeming with thousands of young men in search of work. Somanath Banerjee is one of them who like many others spends his days queuing up at the employment exchange. He wonders what on earth is wrong with the job market? How can so much effort still not lead to anything at all? So what if he is not brilliant like his brothers? So what if he hasn’t passed in the first division like they have? Those who pass in second or third division have to be swept away into oblivion?
Unable to find a job despite his qualifications, the 24-year old Somnath decides to join the order-supply business as a middleman. Once he takes his college sweetheart Tapati to lunch. She discovers that the Somnath of the college days has disappeared somewhere to be replaced by one who is lifeless and inanimate “The man who once spoke in the cadences of poetry now sat silent all the time, speaking only when he had to.” Yet, this was the man of Tapati’s dreams.
Somnath’s ambition drives him to a prostitute and an innocent girl for a contract that will secure the future of Somnath Enterprises.
Meanwhile, Tapati offers marriage to him but Somnath says that he is not in a position to provide her security. She leaves, promising still to come the next day to take him to the registrar’s office for marriage. From here the story moves to Somnath changing from an idealist young man into a corrupt businessman.
Stark and disquieting, the novel deftly exposes the decaying values and rampant corruption of a metropolis that is built on broken dreams and morbid realities. This novel was made into a film titled Jana Aranya in Bengali by Satyajit Ray and it became an award-winning film. Ray described it as the only bleak film he had ever made. In any case, the evocative prose and vivid imagery try to capture the texture of the Bengali original.
—MG
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