No products in the cart.
Return To Shop
| Author(s) | |
|---|---|
| Translator(s) | |
| Cover Designer(s) | |
| Editor(s) | |
| Pages | 148 |
| ISBN | 9789349203105 |
Aditi leaves her ancestral mansion, the Borobari in Keya, Bangladesh, and moves to Kolkata with her refugee family. She builds a career and a life, yet neither feels complete. The hardships around her and the haunting memory of her sister Sudipta, found lifeless by the whispering waves of their village, refuse to let her rest.
In Whispering Waves, Abhijit Sen traces lives rebuilt across borders, where the past lingers and the lost homeland remains the only home the heart truly longs for.
The novel opens with a ghost story — and never quite leaves it behind. Thirty-five years before Aditi wakes from surgery murmuring about spirits, a woman named Sudipta was pulled from the family pond with an earthen pitcher around her neck. Her spirit was said to walk the backyard in wet clothes long after her body was found.
From this haunted beginning, the narrative moves fluidly between past and present, between a vanished village in Bangladesh and the cramped realities of refugee life in Kolkata. We meet Aditi’s family — her quiet, broken father Binoykumar, her warm-hearted mother Sujata, and her devoted brother Prashanto — as they navigate poverty, displacement, and the unspeakable grief of a death that was never fully explained or mourned.
Woven through these family memories are vivid portraits of the world they left behind: the midwife Kamarjhi, bold and radiant and armed with a white knife hidden under her floorboards; the crumbling manor house with its pond and fruit trees; the famine years when rice was smuggled under a saree. The novel is rich with the textures of a lost Bengali world, rendered with sharp social observation and deep emotional intelligence.
Abhijit Sen was born on January 28, 1945, in Keora, a village in the Barishal district of present-day Bangladesh. In the early 1950s, his family relocated to Kolkata, where he began schooling. His educational journey took him to move between Kolkata, Jhargram, and Purulia before returning to Kolkata. Despite the disruptions, he completed his high school and parts of his college education during this period. While working for a general insurance company in Kolkata, Sen pursued higher education, earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in History. His work required extensive travel across various mofussil towns and villages in Bengal, an experience that profoundly influenced his literary works, grounding them in the soil and history of Bengal. In 1969, Sen made the life-altering decision to join the revolutionary Naxal movement. This choice led him to sacrifice his job, family life, and permanent residence in Kolkata. He later spent several years in Malda, in northern West Bengal, before recently returning to Kolkata. Sen’s first novel, Rohu-Chandaler Haar, was published in 1985 and later translated into English as Magic Bones in 1992, a collaborative publication by Abhinav Publications (Delhi) and Facet Books International (New York). The novel earned him the prestigious Bankimchandra Memorial Award in 1992. Additionally, he received the Saratchandra Memorial Award from the University of Calcutta in 2005. Most of the characters in Sen’s stories are drawn from his rich and varied life experiences, especially those during his travels through rural Bengal. His writings reflect a profound connection to the land and its history, resonating with authenticity and a sense of rootedness.
For most of her professional life, Madhura Bhattacharya has been a teacher and an academic administrator at a school and welfare organization in Kolkata. Madhura’s journey in literary translation began after she completed a certification program in the Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University. Since then, she has been actively involved in various translation projects. Her collaborative spirit is evident in her work with other passionate translators, which has led to the formation of Translation & Beyond. This group is currently working on a project to translate a hundred African poems from English to Bengali, a testament to the power of collaboration in the literary field. She also participated in a translation workshop organized by The Antonym Collections, under the mentorship of V. Ramaswamy, to translate Abhijit Sen’s short stories. She is translating a biographical novel by Rupa Chakraborty from English to Bengali.
Nadia Imam is an editor and translator based in Kolkata, India. She works at the intersection of storytelling and language. She translates Bengali fiction into English and edits across genres, with a special interest in children’s literature. Her translated work includes Once Upon the Queens and contributions to The Year’s Best Bengali Stories in Translation 2024. She is currently working on her first novel.
Chirayata Chakrabarty is into many things, and one of them is design. She also edits and translates from Bengali to English.
Share this product with others
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.