The Song of a Boat
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This manuscript of nine short stories and a beginning of a novel explores time, adolescence, class anxieties, old age and its loneliness, relationship ambiguities, male gaze and sexual desire, and conflicts of English language in erstwhile colonialised places. The stories are not based in a distinct geographical place, but the characters speak Bangla and Hindi, and traverse spaces of liminality between Bangla and English, silences and language, unmeasured time and clock. The child narrators attempt to transgress the order imposed on them and practice in different acts of lawlessness. The adult narrators are often the people who come in conflicts with their self-defining forces resulting in simultaneity of human experiences at a single moment.