Book Review

Thus, recognising the enduring appeal of Das’ fiction, Speaking Tiger Books published One More Story About Climbing a Hill, a translated collection of selected stories by the author. The volume includes translations by several translators, including Das himself, and introduces his work to the national audience. Among the stories in the collection, the one that touched the hearts of the readers most deeply and established Das’ reputation as a writer and storyteller is A Night with Arpita (অৰ্পিতাৰ এৰাতি).

The story begins inside a train compartment where our protagonist as well as the narratoris curiously fascinated by a quite young woman. When the story begins, the girl is seated bythe window and gazing intently into the darkness outside, seemingly oblivious to the world around her and this is precisely what catches the attention of our narrator. She is draped in a saree, leading him to assume that she is not an Assamese. More importantly, he senses that something is troubling her deeply. Her replies to herfather is in monosyllables, while her gaze is fixed on the distant darkness outsideas though lost in a melancholic memory. The narrator names her Arpita and lets the readers know that no unnecessary character is allowed in his and Arpita’s story.

As the train keeps moving through the quite night, the narrator’s attention is fixed on Arpita. He keeps watching her from his berth and repeatedly asks himself what it is that Arpita is going through. What burden is she carrying inside her ?. At one point he also notices her crying to sleep. What could be the source of her sorrow? Was it someone who made her a thousand promises of flowers and rainbows and then left her to think where did she go wrong? Was it a prospective groom demanding a lot of dowry, family or societal pressures, academic disappointment? what was the story that she carried within herself, a story so painful that she could not even share it with her father, whotravelling along with her?

Thus, Arpita remains a mystery. There are layers to her story that is unfathomable to the narrator or the reader for that matter. The story ends with an uncertain and ambiguous note. By blurring the lines between fictionand reality, Das presents us with a double ending, leaving ample room for multiple interpretations and also, letting readers become an active participant in the interpretation. They are to decide for themselves which version of events, if any, is to be believed, which can be seen as a distinct post-modern element of the story.

While ‘A Night with Arpita’ remains one of the most loved stories in the collection, the other stories like ‘Ananta with His Seema’, ‘Selim-Sekina’s Love Story’, ‘Keeper of Records’, ‘A Day of Filth and Stench’, too, deal with the hidden or often overlooked emotions of ordinary people. The eighteen stories present characters who deal with life with a seemingly casual attitude but deep down these are people who notice, empathise, carry grief and have desires unspeakable, anxieties, and memories that refuse to fade away. The characters are often trapped between personal aspirations and what society demands of them, forbidding them from ever transgressing beyond accepted boundaries and conformities.

Through his deeply introspective protagonists, Das examines how ordinary middle-class people negotiate loneliness, responsibility, love, regret, and the burden of social conformity in a society that is itself caught between tradition and modernity and the evils that come along. The stories, therefore, function not merely as personal narratives but also as subtle commentaries on the changing social and political landscape.

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2025 and Sahitya Akademi’s Tagore Literature Award in 2011, Das’s position in modern Assamese literature is significant as a writer deeply aware of the emotional and psychological complexities of modern-day individuals. His short stories appear conflicting and unresolvable yet they heal because they are highly relatable. Das, in this collection, is introduced as a “torchbearer of post-modernism in Assam”, which is starkly evident in many of his stories with open-endings, blurring of boundaries between fictional and reality and merging of the author, narrator, and character.

One More Story About Climbing a Hill stands as a proof of Das’s ability of transforming ordinary experience into profound reflections on the human condition. Das’s stories remind us that beneath the surface of the ordinary lives lie unexplainable emotions and it is this sensitivity to the often overlooked and unspoken emotions that secures his place among the most important voices in contemporary Assamese fiction.