Author: Numair Atif Chowdhury
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 111
Read On: Kindle
How Long it Took Me To Read: 3 hours
Plot Summary: In Taxi Wallah and Other Stories, we encounter more of Choudhury's limitless imagination and deep empathy as he captures the many Bangladeshes that make up the nation.
The stories in this collection are bound by their protagonists - outsiders looking in - whether it is the taxi wallah of the title story who ferries tourists to upmarket hotels in Gulshan, the chokra for whom the streets of Dhaka are both sustenance and threat, Rabia the maid who feels compelled to call even the youngest of her employer's children 'Apa', or the brick breaker who finds his life draining away as he hammers rubble at construction sites...
Fuelled by Choudhury's trademark linguistic verve and energy, Taxi Wallah and Other Stories is a searing yet tender portrait of a country that is fractured but lets in light through the cracks.
Review: I bought this book a while back. I think I started reading it a few months ago and read a little, like a page or two and stopped. I wasn't in the right frame of mind to continue reading it. Good decision because I got to read it now and when I was ready for it, plus it's a great book to read in a month where I read only Bengali authors. A writer and a book from Bangladesh is a perfect pick for this month.
This is a collection of short-stories. A very short read. At only 111 pages this book goes by in a huff. I read it in under 3 hours. I started and couldn't stop. And it wasn't an entirely painless experience, these stories are intense. The only break I took from this world was to momentarily put this book down and close my eyes and breathe. There are bits here that will take your breath away and make me sick to your stomach (in a good way). This book was powerful. It sheds light on a world we know, a world we see and a world we live in and a world we (the middle-class) most often choose to ignore. A world that exists and is ignored and it's troubles and ugliness is something we are rather talented at pretending we don't see. To see and hear of this world and it's people big and small is often an uncomfortable thing. Uncomfortable and confronting but necessary. This book makes, forces you to, even for a moment, to look at the world and the lives around you, which I think is a very good thing be.
Each of these stories, short and fleeting as they may be are wholly complete and give you everything you need. You walk into this life and you see and hear and feel everything you need.
These characters in each of these stories are so perfectly etched out. Each and every one of them is painfully human and their worries and anxieties and strives are brought to live so beautifully, we feel everything they feel and you really get to know them. This doesn't often happen in short stories. It takes a gifted writer to achieve this level of depth in short stories.
A lot of this book takes place inside a character's mind. Their inner thoughts, musings, worries and pain is where we spend most time and this really helps in bringing these characters to life.
I love that in any country, especially in the subcontinent, there are two realities, maybe a hundred different realities that are so varied from each other and stories like this show us the divide and how almost comically cut-off these worlds are from each other.
This isn't an easy read, it's an important book and one I hope you pick up, but go in knowing these is a lot going on here that will get under your skin and make you squirm. Maybe reading it in one go was a bad idea, so read it but take a breather in between.
Rating: 4/5
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