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A Bengali literary masterpiece—follow Amal Gupta, a writer approaching 60, navigating Kolkata’s streets, secret identities & the hunger to create anew.
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| Pages | 276 |
| ISBN | 9789349203747 |
The mysterious, wild and ageless inner-world of the artist — swelling words, scattered stories and characters, half rendered. An endless search for the elixir: creation that outruns banality, wins death. Secret Life holds the key to the place free of all fetters that his outer life carries — years, conventions, righteousness. This is the story of Amal, the writer — a writer who desired for rebirth in creation, in love and connection, in living many lives, in defying the usual and taking flight into the wide, inexplicable skies.
Arindam Basu’s masterpiece is not just a book, it is an experience.
Amal Gupta is approaching sixty, a prize-winning writer whose books don’t sell much, wandering the streets of Dum Dum on a spring morning with nowhere particular to go. He has rented homes across Kolkata’s neighbourhoods for thirty-two years — Cossipore, Baranagar, Bhowanipore — treating the city as his classroom and himself as its most devoted student. Now, standing on the pavement with the wind in his salt-and-pepper hair, he wonders whether there is any joy left in writing at all.
What unfolds is less a plot than a rich, roving portrait of a man in full. Amal bluffs his way through a TV repair complaint by impersonating a police officer, then a local gangster — slipping in and out of invented identities with the ease of a born actor. He haggles with his wife Gauri over figs and bathroom time with the same playful tenderness that once fuelled his finest novels. He reads a newspaper report about a sixty-year-old man who ended his life in despair, and finds himself utterly unable to relate to such purposelessness.
Meanwhile, in a house not far away, a young woman named Swati has devoted an entire shelf of her bookcase to Amal Gupta’s collected works — every single one — bought with her tutoring money, read with a devotion bordering on obsession.
Funny, melancholic, and shot through with poems that arrive in Amal’s mind like sudden weather, this is a novel about what it means to live a second life inside the first — the life of the imagination, the only one that truly counts.
Born in 1967, Kolkata, Arindam spent some of his childhood in Assam and Asansol. He worked as a salesman and did various businesses. He started his career working as an artist at a newspaper publishing. He has been the editor of the monthly literary magazine Parashpathar and the online monthly literary magazine Sukhpath. He started writing in his mid-twenties and has published ten novels so far. He has penned more than two hundred stories, a travelogue, a collection of prose and children’s stories. He has translated stories from other Indian languages. He was awarded the ‘West Bengal Academy’ award, the ‘Namita Chatterjee Literary Award’, and the ‘Bangiya Sahitya Parishat’ award for his works. He has also received the ‘Galpasarani’ and ‘Galpasmela’ awards for his stories.
Subarna Banerjee is a writer based in Kolkata, India. She completed her Masters in English Literature from Jadavpur University and now works as a full-time associate editor at a local publishing house and a freelance translator. While her niche lies in atmospheric short stories and poems, she hopes to write her own novels someday soon. She considers herself an avid book dragon and ardent fangirl, and loves listening to music and gaming in her spare time.
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