This book of short stories landed this Spring. After I read it once, I wanted to read it one more time and then once again. And now finally when I sat down to write this review, something or everything seemed to hit. What with the young 16-year-old author—Rudrakshi Bhattacharjee—already departed to a better world, leaving back brilliantly written short stories and also loyalist committed friends such as writer Shinie Antony who saw to it that Rudrakshi’s short stories got published, so that you and I could read an entire array of those masterpieces.
As one reads through Rudrakshi’s writings, the very depth and the sheer magnitude of her thought process holds out. Her mind, no ordinary, is that of a genius. If only this genius could have lived somewhat longer. After all, 16 is no age to go but even with that premature departure she’s left back this treasure of her writings.
To quote Andrew Gretes, who mentored Rudrakshi when she was selected for the 2017 Adriot Journal Mentorship Program, “There’s a wonderful maturity in so many of Rudrakshi’s sentences. When I read a line like, ‘Sometimes she used to think her parents were characters from different plays who came to rest under the same roof’, the whole drama of being a child (half-offspring, half-spy)—our desperate quest to decode our parents—it all comes swirling back to me and gives me chills. Rudrakshi’s fiction is littered with such lines.”
Yes, there’s that something or everything so very refreshingly beckoning to her language, to the very words, to the very style that perhaps more than nudged Shinie to put together this book. “Sitting with her stories strewn all around me, bits and pieces of her fiction—some long, some just a line, and her poetry, both finished and unfinished—I grew feverish with the discovery of so rare a voice. Her mother, an old friend, had gathered Rudrakshi’s words from everywhere: journals that published them, her computer, her notebooks, her diary, scraps of paper she’d scribbled on…. In recent months, I sat with Rudrakshi’s mother, who shared many memories of her, let me read her notebooks and journals, and permitted me to get a glimpse of the writer’s life.”
Webbed and inter-webbed are those ‘glimpses’ or call them ‘episodes’ from her life which go a long way in connecting her to the reader. Space constraints come in the way, so let me try and fit in one brief passage to relay how her thoughts went along.Quoting from the book: “Let’s take a picture of the steps, R’s mother says. It’s their week in New York; R loves the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art). An old man is sketching on the steps, two bananas in a brown paper bag beside him.
R says, Mama, I think that’s all his lunch is. Let’s buy his sketches. That will give him some more lunch money. Also, more people will stop by, seeing us buy. He will get some more customers…” Well, that was this young brilliant girl, Rudrakshi Bhattacharjee, who thought and wrote so very beautifully. Her words and thoughts flowing along with such wonderful ease.Little wonder her book of short stories bagged the AutHer Awards 2020 for the debut fiction writing category.
This is How it Took Place
By: Rudrakshi Bhattacharjee
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 213
Price: ₹399