By alka saraogi, Trans. John Vater
Register Me as Kulbhushan
A Novel
What’s in a name?
Traversing the streets of Calcutta in his one-and-a-half slippers, our dark lanky hero, variously known as Bhushan Chacha, Kulbhushan Jain and Gopal Chandra Das, wanders a maze of memories, searching for himself. Like many East Bengalis scarred by the trauma of Partition, he has trained himself to dive into forgetfulness. By punching the ‘button of forgetting’—a mantra taught to him by his childhood friend Shyama Dhobi—he can induce instant amnesia and survive the suffocating, alien streets and the belittlements of his Marwari relatives, whose household drudgery he shoulders. But forgetfulness has a cost.
Shyama, too, is more than he seems. Delivered into his parents’ lap by an itinerant fakir and blessed with admirable resourcefulness, he rises through the ranks. He transforms from washerman to rickshaw-puller to trusted confidante of cotton mill-owning Bengali aristocrats—all amid the mounting communal violence and brutality of the West Pakistani army that sets the stage for the Bangladesh Liberation War. When injustice becomes unbearable, Shyama is compelled to join the freedom fighters in search of redress and meaning.
At once humorous, sincere and philosophical, Register Me as Kulbhushan is a modern epic of exile and the fundamental human need to belong.
Author, Translator, And editor
John Vater
John Vater is a writer and literary translator whose work spans literature, translation, and international affairs. He is the co-translator of The Play of Dolls: Stories by Hindi writer Kunwar Narain (Penguin Random House India) and the co-author of More Than the Eye Can See (World Scientific), written with Singapore’s Former Ambassador-at-Large Gopinath Pillai. His third book, Register Me as Kulbhushan, a translated novel by Alka Saraogi, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House India in May.
He is a graduate of the Literary Translation Workshop at the University of Iowa, was a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, and attended the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC) as an ‘Emerging Translator,’ amongst other artist residencies. His translations and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, The Asian Literary Review, The Bombay Review, Indian Literature Today, and Carnegie India, among others. He is currently based in Singapore.
Other Books
Trans. John Vater and Apurva Narain
Kunwar Narain’s unusual short stories broke new ground and rejuvenated the genre when they appeared on the Indian literary landscape in 1971. Half a century later, in vivid English translation for the first time, they seem just as far-reaching — sometimes in the novelty of their insight, sometimes in their transcendence, sometimes in the world views they together uncover.
By turns allegorical, satirical, poetic, poignant, playful and bizarre, Narain’s layered, often deceptively simple tales unravel the existential and moral bewilderments of a society navigating the cold, cruel worlds of its own creation, while also allowing hope in the truly human. These bold, sometimes comic, often experimental and metaphysical stories weave love and otherness, fantasy and history, tenderness and silence — leaving us both restive and redeemed at once.
(With a critical introduction written by John Vater and an Afterword by the author’s son)
By Gopinath Pillai and John Vater
More Than The Eye Can See tells the story of Gopinath Pillai, a Singaporean businessman and diplomat who served as Singapore’s Non-Resident Ambassador to Iran (1989-2008) and High Commissioner to Pakistan (1994-2001). Alongside working with prominent members of Singapore’s pioneering generation to strengthen the country’s manufacturing profile and international trade during the Cold War, he broke into liberalising India as a trailblazing entrepreneur and contributed to the nation’s public life as the first Chairman of NTUC Fairprice and Founder Chairman of the Institute of South Asian Studies.
A self-described “Jack of All Trades,” Gopi’s memoirs frame episodes of personal struggle against milestones in the progress of the Nation. Born in Singapore to Malayalee parents in 1937, Gopi spent his early childhood in India throughout the Japanese Occupation, where he witnessed the Communist Movement in Kerala first-hand. When he returned to Singapore in 1946, Gopi grew up in a multi-racial society taking its fledgling steps as a democracy. His career took him all over — to Thailand and Malaysia as an economist and journalist and the Middle East and America as a manager — reflecting Singapore’s early industrialization and the pursuit of its values and interests abroad and at home.
(With a foreword written by Emeritus Senior Minister and Former Prime Minister, Singapore, Goh Chok Tong)
Register me as Kulbhushan is a sharply observed and deeply nuanced portrayal of the fractures that run through Bengal’s various communities—and the recurring violence those divisions ignite. Alka Saraogi, one of India’s greatest writers, is served brilliantly by this inventive translation, which brings her vision to vivid life
– From praise for the book by Amitav ghosh, author of ‘the shadow lines’ and ‘the hungry tide’
The Play of Dolls, expertly translated by John Vater and Apurva Narain, is a master class in storytelling, which offers readers a bewildering variety of ways to imagine anew their own romances with the world…
– From praise for the author by Christopher Merrill, author of ‘self-portrait with dogwood’
More Than the Eye Can See is an appropriate title for a book whose sweep encompasses notable milestones in Singapore’s history … the book also captures the zeitgeist of the times and how the Singapore Spirit evolved with each passing decade.