WILD ANIMALS PROHIBITED

A collection of inventive, experimental short stories by Bengali author Misra.

Following the American publication of Misra’s This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels, this volume of short fiction offers readers a broad range of the author's work. Dating from the 1970s and '80s, these stories include everything from everyday happenings to politically charged takes on the uncanny and terrifying. “Radioactive Waste” opens with a tryst between two lovers but juxtaposes that with scenes from folklore and gut-wrenching moments from war. Philosophical passages collide with scenes out of a horror novel, including sections focusing on a predatory creature: “Once complete darkness envelops the place, it emerges, it searches for raw humans.” This spirit of parallel narratives also arises in “A Gem of a Man,” in which a story about a long-lived man known as Bucket Baba alternates with a fable about how humans got their life span to begin with. The structural risks and intellectual riffs aren’t the only strengths to be found here. Misra is also skilled at evoking precise details within a scene, as in this passage from the opening of “Secret Vrindavan”: “A dark-skinned five-year-old girl wearing only a red string-band on her waist chewed on a raw guava and tried to press close to the glass window of the colourful box.” And some of the stories take bolder structural risks; in “Will You Preserve Your Chastity, Aparna?” which concerns itself with desire and intimacy, the text gives way to a table at one point, accentuating the skewed connection between narrator and reader.

There’s a lot to admire and savor in these challenging works.