A Real Durwan

“In fact, the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Boori Ma was her voice: brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds, and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut. It was with this voice that she enumerated, twice a day as she swept the stairwell, the details of her plight and losses suffered since her deportation to Calcutta after Partition.”

The characterization of Boori Ma’s voice establishes her backstory and grants a sense of agency to all the dialogue that follows this description. Despite all the residents’ insistence on the dubiousness of Boori Ma’s origin story, her voice is testament to the difficulties she has faced.

“Whether there was any truth to Boori Ma’s litanies no one could be sure. For one thing, every day, the perimeters of her former estate seemed to double, as did the contents of her almari and coffer boxes. No one doubted she was a refugee; the accent in her Bengali made that clear. Still, the residents of this particular flat-building could not reconcile Boori Ma’s claims to prior wealth alongside the more likely account of how she had crossed the East Bengal border, with the thousands of others, on the back of a truck, between sacks of hemp.”

In one of the story’s rare moments of directly revealing the characters’ attitudes, the narration ventures from Boori Ma’s perspective to address the general impressions of the building’s residents. Their imagination cannot extend far enough to entertain that such an ostensibly prosperous individual could ever end up in Boori Ma’s position. More specifically, this quotation’s last sentence clarifies that the residents struggle to “reconcile” her glamorous story of wealth with her unglamorous story of crossing the border “on the back of a truck, between sacks of hemp.” In other words, they doubt that an affluent person would ever flee her country in such an uncomfortable, unceremonious manner. Perhaps they struggle to conceptualize such drastic dispossession, or perhaps they’re averse to the idea that a wealthy person could ever suffer.