These Tongues That Grow Roots by Sucharita Dutta-Asane, published by Dhauli Books, is a collection of 15 stories that resists the allure of conventional storytelling, crafting instead a meditative exploration of memory, violence, and the quiet resonances of human experience. At 168 pages, it offers a compact yet profound journey through narratives that reflect on pervasiveness of violence, loss and longing, indicated by beginning and ending the collection with war stories: “War 1” and “War 2”; a structure that suggests an unending cycle of conflict, both external and internal.
A space of ‘nowhereness’
Dutta-Asane's narratives are not driven by plot but by reflection, inviting the reader to engage actively with the text. The opening story, set in the Naxal times of Calcutta, introduces a recurring theme – violence and its aftermath. In “Wind, Woman, River,” the wind becomes a narrator, embodying the fragmented memories of Partition. This motif of memory recurs throughout, facilitating an exploration of themes such as loss, grief, and the resultant perplexities, but also often examining the very act of remembering itself and its inherent struggles. The stories oscillate between the deeply personal and the unsettlingly political, rendering the past and present inseparable.
Each tale unfolds in a space of “nowhereness,” as Randhir Khare aptly describes it, with Dutta-Asane’s prose striking a balance between lyrical clarity and compassionate introspection. The language, consciously minimalist, demands to be savored – phrases, names, and even silences are imbued with weight, as if the texture of the words must be chewed and tasted. This stylistic choice agrees with the lyrical structure of the stories where the unspoken carries as much significance as the spoken.
The stories resist the consumerist hunger for narrative resolution. Instead, the author offers indirections, glimpses into lives and contexts that the reader must piece together. In “Who,” a story about loneliness, the narration conceals rather than reveals, embodying the theme in its sparse yet evocative form. Similarly, “Only the Synonyms of Emptiness” meditates on a deserted wife’s inner life, hovering between words, things, and memories. Dutta-Asane’s refusal to satisfy narrative curiosity becomes an act of trust in her readers, a call to partner in the storytelling.
Violence is omnipresent – not as a spectacle but as a haunting undercurrent. The Covid-era stories, “Interlude” and “Pinki”, capture isolation and estrangement with striking detail, whether in the desolate life of a 72-year-old man or the harrowing journeys of a migrant laborer. The title story, a poetic dreamscape, transcends narrative convention entirely. Memory, reality, and imagination fuse into a meditation on emotional bruises and intergenerational relationships.
Dutta-Asane’s narrators are diverse, ranging from children to elderly amnesiacs, from humans to elements of nature. In “The Silence of Falling Snow,” a thespian mother’s dark, reflective memories are inhabited by her son, blurring the lines between reality and performance. This story powerfully and playfully evokes memories of not only Anton Chekhov’s “The Swan Song”, albeit the actor here being a woman, but also Hitchcock’s “Psycho”. “Petni,” narrated by a child, captures the dissolution of a family, with lyrical elements softening the crux of familial discord. Each story evokes loss and longing, an absence of a sense of connectedness that mirrors the broader fractures of a world in turmoil.
Almost hyperreal
What distinguishes These Tongues That Grow Roots is its masterful lyrical structuring, a quality that permeates every story in the collection. Dutta-Asane’s preoccupation with language is palpable, shaping each line with a poet’s precision and care. Her prose transcends conventional realism, aspiring to the hyperreal, where the familiar is refracted through a poetic lens that heightens its emotional and sensory resonance. The language is pared down to its essence, eschewing narrative density in favor of a reflective scaffolding that invites the reader to linger, to feel the rhythm of the sentences and the weight of their pauses.
The stories do not merely narrate events; they evoke moods, impressions, and inner landscapes. Each sentence seems sculpted to hold more than its literal meaning, its texture and cadence drawing the reader into an intimate interplay of thought and feeling. Sucharita’s prose compels not just reading but an active engagement – each word and phrase a stepping stone into deeper reflection, each silence an invitation to imagine what lies beyond.
The final story, a harrowing account of a teenage girl confronting the terror of sexual harassment, is set against the backdrop of rising right-wingism, bringing the collection full circle to the pervasive violence that underpins it. Yet, even here, Dutta-Asane eschews the straightforwardness of reportage, opting instead to explore the deeper, lingering scars such violence inflicts – the quiet erasure of ways of life, the numbing complicity of the educated middle class, and the self-serving prejudices that enable systemic oppression.
Through this and other stories, the collection holds up a mirror to the reader, urging an uncomfortable introspection. It compels one to confront their own biases, their passive participation in the cycles of violence that plague society. The irony of progress – of increased education, urbanization, and modernisation – becomes a sharp undercurrent, as these very markers of advancement often exacerbate the victimisation of the vulnerable, whether people or the natural world. Sucharita’s narratives do not merely recount events; it challenge the reader to grapple with the unsettling realisation that silence, indifference, and privilege can be as destructive as overt acts of violence.
In These Tongues That Grow Roots, Dutta-Asane has cloaked the soul of poetry with the body of stories. The collection demands an active, almost meditative engagement, where the reader is invited not just to read but to reflect, to feel, to imagine. It is a rare and rewarding literary experience, a book of compassion, reflection, and poetic resonance.
These Tongues that Grow Roots, Sucharita Dutta-Asane, Dhauli Books.
