In 2020, Open Letter Books introduced much of the English-speaking world to the prolific Bengali writer Subimal Misra, publishing two of his “anti-novels” in the single volume This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale. Now, the publisher returns with a smart collection compiling 24 of Misra’s stories written in the 1970s and 80s, Wild Animals Prohibited. Both books are gorgeously assembled and translated by V. Ramaswamy who, in the collection’s foreword, explains the difficulty in rendering Misra’s intentions into English, saying, “It is very frustrating and dismaying that one simply cannot really translate dialects or accents, or voices/language forms. The reader of the English translation — unknowingly — entirely misses so much more that the original Bengali has.” Ramaswamy’s concern is valid, particularly since Misra himself has argued, when explaining his writing philosophy, “Breaking narrative — that is what I seek to do … The emphasis is not on what I say, but how I say it.” And yet, even with these inevitable losses, thanks to Misra’s keen observations and experimental approaches, Wild Animals Prohibited frequently crackles with life as it spotlights the downtrodden and ridicules the middle class of Bengal.
The opening title story is perhaps the most conventional in structure, and it acts as a primer for those unfamiliar with both the author’s politics and the themes that recur throughout his fiction. Here, a small group of well-off men and women gather at an apartment for a sex party, while below their windows, members of the lower class sit around and play cards or beg for loose change. In the story’s first several pages, Misra writes his protagonists as horny yet harmless, but by mid-story, he shows their true nature by inserting a jarring passage when a young beggar interrupts their party:
“Sometimes we teased her: ‘Hey girl, wanna come and drink some booze?’ She stared at us with wide eyes as we fondled each other. Sometimes one of us got up in exasperation and twisted her arm. She would turn blue in pain and her eyes saw only darkness as she tried to protect her now withered young breasts as well as her baby. Sometimes we chucked whatever we could find at her — pieces of stone, for instance. We even spat at her. Some days my wife took the situation into her own hands. When the water in the kettle boiled she splashed it on the girl’s body, and when the girl and the baby screamed at the sudden attack, we enjoyed it.”
This violent shift in character casts a pall over the remainder of the story, and it is the first of many times Misra prods those considered “haves” by society. “By the Roots” concerns a poor villager who is selected to become a city police officer. Soon, he sheds his village attitudes and integrates into the political machine, protecting landlords and arresting men that remind him of his abandoned kin. In “Meat Was Bartered,” corrupt authorities torture a man during a community-wide sickness outbreak, and “Come, See India” presents a cultural microcosm when a rainstorm forces those seeking shelter under the same veranda that a beggar woman calls home. As the space becomes overcrowded, the newcomers, mostly middle class, call out the beggar, demanding her space and forcing her and her young children into the rain. In these stories, as in the above passage, Misra turns character emotions on a dime, and on a sentence level, this choice forces an uneasiness onto his audience. It’s a technique that likewise prevents his stories from feeling simplistic. Characters, despite their wealth, live somewhere in the gray, possessing virtues and vices, peace and violence.
Beyond these societal critiques, Subimal Misra’s dedication to varied experimental forms makes Wild Animals Prohibited a fascinating literary endeavor. “36 Feet Toward Revolution” opens with a brilliantly thorny sentence that sets the story’s plot in motion while additionally establishing a narrative personality: “Suddenly this morning, at exactly nine-thirty, Subhendu, like a fool, got shot on the curb at the crossing.” From here, Misra slowly erodes any sense of reality, painting a dreamlike landscape where the injured Subhendu is operated on by a headless surgeon, has his heart removed, and is sent out into the world carrying the extracted organ in a box. This method of grounding the reader, only to then jettison them into the unusual, is powerful, leaving one in a position to decide what truly transpired after the initial, realist introduction. In a similar vein, “In a Deserted Spot Measuring a Foot and a Half” overwhelms with a stream of observations (“Near the green ornamented arch, green men find the much desired machine gun. Soil beneath soil, air beneath air, life within life”) that are more prose poem than story. And rather than relying on conventional structure, Misra again asks his audience to contribute to unravel the truth, this time involving the murder of a young woman named Surupa. Reader participation reaches its apex in “Will You Preserve Your Chastity, Aparna?”, dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. The narrative incorporates excerpts from women’s magazines, Masters and Johnson reports, and interviews to dissect the title question, and about halfway through the story, Misra includes a chart for his readers to complete, asking for their opinions on love in marriage.
In these three stories, the playfulness of Misra’s prose ushers the consumer into the author’s sexually and violently charged environment, not as spectators but as co-conspirators. It acknowledges that reader interpretation is often just as important as an author’s intent. However, in stories like “Spot Eczematous,” Misra pushes back on this very mindset, employing metafictional interruptions to add contextual heft to the story of a man watching a woman eat lice. Each of these interruptions appears in a larger point font, so they not only impede forward progression verbally, but they also visually act as blockades within the text. For instance, in the following, the protagonist does his best to avoid vomiting while witnessing the woman’s performance:
“So far he had been trying to keep it down, but he could no longer control it, and Owack! Owack! — he retched out a mouthful of vomit on the girl. In this planet of ours, of the 2,850,000,000 inhabitants, only 1,600,000 get an adequate quantity of food — which means that the number of people in the world who go to sleep every night on an empty stomach is double the population of India. The vomit trickled down the girl’s bell-bots, tummy, buttocks and thighs.”
Such metafictional elements purposefully divert attention in a smart-alecky manner, going so far in the closing paragraphs of the story as to explain the three basic maxims a reader is meant to take from its plot. Instead of encouraging interpretation, Misra’s narrator suggests those reading the story are simpletons requiring careful handholding.
In contradicting the collaborative feel of his other stories, Misra proves himself to be a crafty storyteller, and the more one reads Wild Animals Prohibited, the less one may be able to pinpoint his overall intentions. “Gem of a Man” reads like a fable, with alternating storylines relaying the life of a holy man and the initial conversations with God establishing man’s lifespan. Meanwhile, “A Perfect Picture of This Social System — Who’s Responsible?” employs a reportage flair to recall scenes from a fictional documentary on prostitution. Styles butt heads in Wild Animals Prohibited, yet the author’s commitment to “breaking narrative” is invigorating, and his slippery objectives only make for a more noteworthy experience.
In the story, “Babbi,” Misra writes the following:
“All these disjointed narratives, coming in succession, produce a reaction in the readers’ minds. To extend their influence onto feeling and then go beyond that — to poison. This is what shock treatment is all about. Their mental balance wilts. The insensitive calculus of reason is shaken.”
This passage functions well to describe the experience of reading Subimal Misra’s short anti-stories. In the writer’s varied works, strict analysis merges with surrealism, prose can be read as poetry, parallel storylines give way to metafiction, fonts shift size, and charts appear for reader participation. Techniques pile up, and the only constant — in fact, the only thread necessary to bind the collection — is Misra’s sense of unpredictability. While reading the collection can occasionally be an exhausting enterprise requiring careful interpretation and a bit of historical Googling of Naxalite politics, Wild Animals Prohibited is also a book that, once read, simply cannot be forgotten.
[Published by Open Letter Books on July 13, 2021, 300 pages, $15.95 paperback]