That sleep never alrights anything was known only too well by Lalitkumar and Shobharani. Because even after their uninterrupted and blissful sleep, even after Harbart was born, even after a vast array of joys and sorrows, in the end, the film had been a flop.

A flop has no picture. Only sound. Growing fainter and fainter and so faint that you can barely hear the words:

Cat, bat, water, dog, fish …

Cat, bat, water, dog, fish …

Cat, bat, water, dog, fish …

Cat, bat, water, dog, fish …

Afterword

I first came across the work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014) about a decade ago in Calcutta, after a long afternoon of wandering conversation of the kind that Bengalis call adda, a session that no doubt included numerous cups of tea, many cigarettes, much talk about books, films, and politics before peaking, in the evening, with kebabs and cheap Indian rum. Still, these freewheeling hours of aimless mental flaneurie that make no concessions to modernity’s iron cage of productivity and self-improvement have their own usefulness. Somewhere in the course of that day, from the recommendations of my companions, I ended up buying a copy of Harbart.

The book was printed, in the manner characteristic of Bengali publishing, as an emaciated hardboard volume that resembled a pamphlet more than a hardback. Yet appearances can be deceptive, and in more ways than one in this case. The slimness of Harbart, like the seeming fragility of its eponymous protagonist, was mere camouflage. It wasn’t a book so much as a bomb, assembled with precision and intent. It was as if Bhattacharya had meticulously gathered fragments from a broken, fractured world, wiring the parts together with language and soldering the terminals with humor, compassion, and rage—and then set the story’s setting on a timer. You can hear it ticking as you read Harbart, before the book explodes in your hands.

The target of this novel-bomb is not the reader but the complacency of the reader, and everything that has gone into making that complacency possible—the beguiling but brutal fantasies of capitalism, consumerism, and globalization; the mythologies of power that will not look at those left behind or those being reluctantly dragged along; the smug assertion, ever since the collapse of the internationalist left in the nineties, that we are living, give or take a few incidental details, in the best of all possible times.

Harbart demolishes such established pieties right from the start, opening with a summer night in a Calcutta back alley where a group of men vomit out their night’s intake of alcohol and food and a rag-clad madwoman splashes water on herself, legs wide open. This is Bhattacharya’s city, where it is irrelevant that nativist pride has responded to globalization by insisting it be called Kolkata in English, or that an autocratic political leader, having dethroned a leftist government that ceased to be leftist in almost everything but name, offered to boost that nativist pride further by constructing, in the manner of London, a Kolkata Eye along its shabby, polluted waterfront. The metropolis in Harbart is a far cry from all this. It is a city out of joint, a world turned upside down, a place where swarming cockroaches fly upward like angels and satellite dishes gape at the sky in the hope of swallowing a falling star. It is even a city with a fairy, but a fairy unable to help Harbart as he lies in bed, his life ebbing away from the point where he has severed a vein on his left hand with a razor blade.