My Kind of Girl

by Buddhadeva Bose

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

A modern-day Bengali Decameron, My Kind of Girl is a sensitive and vibrant novella containing four disarming accounts of unrequited love. In a railway station one bleak December night, four strangers from different walks of life —a contractor, a government bureaucrat, a writer, and a doctor—face an overnight delay. The sight of a young loving couple prompts them to reflect on and share with each other their own experiences of the vagaries of the human heart in a story cycle that is in turn melancholy, playful, wise, and heart-wrenching. The tales reveal each traveler's inner landscape and provide an illuminating glimpse into contemporary life in India. Coming out of a great storytelling tradition, My Kind of Girl is a moving and imaginative look at love from one of India's most celebrated writers.

Release date: November 1, 2010

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 138

Sample

A bitingly cold night in December. Four passengers sat silently in the first-class waiting room of Tundla station. All four were covered from head to toe, concealed by their overcoats, but even in the dim light of that stark, dispassionate room, built and decorated in accordance with the Indian Railway’s precise specifications, it was obvious that they were very different individuals, thrown together from different corners of society. The one in the easy chair had an enormously – even indecently – powerful body, as though he were a giant beast, the kind that out- grows its clothes and shoes at sixteen, to the amazement of its parents. His face was large too, almost as big as a jackfruit, and longish, and on the broad expanse of his cheeks – perhaps because his pores were swollen from the cold – the seeds of next morning’s beard were already sprouting in blue dots. The second one was a nicely proportioned, pleasant looking man, dapper, well-groomed, immaculate in his western garb; complete with hat, cane and gloves.