BRAHMA'S WEAPON

A collection of translated stories by Debi, one of the greatest Bengali writers of the 20th century.

Debi is virtually unknown outside of India despite her prolific and celebrated career—in fact, very little of her considerable body of work has been translated into English, an unfortunate oversight observed by Jhumpa Lahiri’s brilliant introduction to this collection. This assemblage of Debi’s short fiction, translated with great clarity and subtlety by Gupta, constitutes an important literary event. The nearly two dozen stories are exemplary of Debi’s body of work—set in her native Calcutta, they focus on the emotional trials of domestic life with a perceptive eye trained on the complex relationships between men and women, particularly husbands and wives. In the book’s titular story, “Brahma’s Weapon,” Ronobir has been out of work for 17 months, and as a result, the household has been reduced to penury. He asks his wife, Oshima, to ask Debobroto (a successful businessman), an old friend of hers, for a job—it’s a humiliating request because she hasn’t seen him in 11 years and once “there was a degree of intimacy between them.” Debi artfully probes the profound shame felt by both and the acrimony between the two it engenders, especially under the morally pulverizing weight of poverty: “Scarcity destroys character.” In the haunting tale “Entering the Underworld,” 16-year-old Aroti is forced to beg on behalf of her shameless mother and greedy father, both of whom are unemployed. She despises her parents for compromising her respectability but learns, through the experience of hunger, the tenuousness of one’s dignity. Debi seamlessly combines a sociological precision with a lighthearted touch. For those new to Debi’s work, this is a remarkable introduction, one that showcases her deep reserves of literary radiance.

A hypnotically beautiful collection of stories by a literary master.