NAHUMER GRAM O ONYANYO MUSEUM || PARIMAL BHATTACHARYA

Many years after Baudelaire’s aborted voyage to Calcutta, a child was born in a bylane of the city’s suburb. He adopted a stray puppy and was himself adopted into a continent of words and images. One day, at a bend in the lane of his seedy, violence-torn neighbourhood, he discovered Garcia Marquez’s Macondo. The magical journey has continued ever since: from cheap street fiction to Soviet-era literature, from the murky urban imagery of Jibananda Das’s poetry to the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, it has taken him to a landscape that dreams up its own author, where a girl still waits amid the detritus of a lost civilization for the poet who had abandoned her. Genre-bending, and written in Parimal Bhattacharya’s inimitable prose, Nahumer Gram O Onyanyo Museum celebrates artistic imagination in the teeth of dark times.