In His Short Stories, Numair had Encapsulated Many Shades of Bangladesh in Bare Minimum Words Using Hair-raising, Allusive—His ‘Trademark’ Narration
Book Review by Dhiraj Sindhi
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| Taxi Wallah and Other Stories by Numair Atif Choudhury |
Author: Numair Atif Choudhury
ISBN: 978-9354892134
Genre: Collection of Short Stories
Length: 132 Pages
Publication Date: 17th September 2021
Publisher: Fourth Estate India – An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Cover Art: Sarnath Banerjee
Cover Designer: Website: arts.mit.edu/ | Instagram: @sarnathbanerjee
Order your copy right now: https://amzn.to/3wxYOIX
After studying creative writing at Oberlin College and the University of East Anglia, Dr. Numair Atif Choudhury did a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Dallas. He had been working on Babu Bangladesh!, his epic first novel, for nearly fifteen years. Soon after completing the final draft, he passed away in an accident in 2018.
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| Numair Atif Choudhury |
Disclaimer: This review is only intended for initiating discussions. The opinions and views presented in this article are my own and do not reflect anything about the book's author.
Taxi Wallah and Other Stories is a collection of eleven short stories written by Late Numair Atif Choudhury that were published in different anthologies, print media and online forums throughout his writing career. The short stories are preceded by an introduction by his friend and another Bangladeshi-origin author—Nadeem Zaman. This introduction tells you how Numair’s first and only novel—Babu Bangladesh!—came to be published and a lot of other information about the author’s voice, language, the issues he chose to address and in which way, etc. The introduction also contains a sort of summary and a glimpse; a brief look into the study or the standard reading of each short story, which, in my opinion, was the best decision for the reasons you will come to know in the latter part of this review.
The introduction serves as the best review (not a critique) each story can have—what each story is trying to convey, what elements and devices are used, what characters are going through, why is it written, everything you could think of. That’s why I need not give you a summary of each story and review them separately for you. Instead, I will share my experience of reading this collection of short stories rather than a standard examination of different elements.
(Note: You can read the Introduction by downloading the sample on your Kindle app or device. Introduction in the sample will introduce you to many of these short stories. Six out of eleven, to be precise.)
First of all, the writing style. The writing style for each story is unique with different narrators, language and narrative techniques. But there is something common in the output, which is—rubbing out paintings of day-to-day landscapes our eyes have become accustomed to and exposing the darkness of despairing and wretched reality behind those customary sights; faintly splattering the brightness of hope on this blackened canvas. This strand of hope can easily be seen in the stories titled ‘Crumble’ and ‘Chokra’.
The second feature of his writing that I recognised is—dropping bombs of menace which creates a threatening effect amidst the serene and composed flow of writing, not breaking the flow, rather further paralysing the senses and stripping off readers of their beliefs and demystifying the crooked patterns of actual-world hidden behind the world of make-believe. Basically, the writer blurs the line between surrealism and realism to reveal a darker shade of reality as calmly as he could. ‘Different Eyes’ and ‘Asking Why’ are two such stories that epitomize this idea.
The third and the last feature that we will be discussing in this review is—several stories in this collection are abstract on the face of it. You couldn’t start to imagine what message or moral this story is trying to implicitly convey, what is being concealed underneath all the devices, characters and conversations that we are reading. That is why I needed the help of the introduction to see the conclusion or the conceptualization that a particular story carries with it. ‘The Truth’ and ‘On the Way’ are those stories for which I had to get back to the introduction part. This is not bad at all, in fact, I propose every collection of short stories should start with such insightful an introduction.
Happy Reading!
