'One More Story About Climbing a Hill': Devabrata Das's postmodernist take in Assamese short stories

The eighteen short stories that constitute One More Story about Climbing a Hill by Devabrata Das collate into an extended social commentary of what is at stake when passivity becomes the norm. The instances are random and the actions, minimal. It is, then, the characters that drive the plot. Devabrata Das is introduced in this collection as a “torchbearer of post-modernism in Assam” and rightly so – for his stories are infused with overt elements of the same. Recognised with the Tagore Literature Award of the Sahitya Akademi in 2011, Das’s creative opus is mostly didactic, but without being redundant.

Imaginative detours

The imagery that Das uses in his narrative has elements of make-belief – it is, in fact, his imaginative detours that make it impossible to distinguish between the real and the fictional. The first story in the collection, “A Night with Arpita,” projects a confusing denouement of disbelief. In a quick double ending, the reader is confounded with the question of choice – who should they, after all, believe? Das continues his surrealism in stories like “In the Land of the Dead,” where he blends the social evil of selling corpses with fantasy. The malicious dead protagonist satirically laments the life he spent...

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