Imaan

About the Book
FROM A WRITER WHO’S LIVED MANY LIVES—THAT OF A REFUGEE, A CLEANER, A NAXAL, A RICKSHAW-PULLER, A COOK, AND NOW AN MLA

Imaan Ali had entered Central Jail as an infant with his mother, who was charged with the murder of his father. Zahura Bibi died when he was six, and he grew up, shuttling between a juvenile remand home and the boys’ ward in the prison. Now, twenty years later, he has been released. With no family or home to return to, he ends up at the Jadavpur railway station, becoming a ragpicker on the advice of a former jail-mate, an expert pickpocket.

The world of the free baffles him, and although the people living in the shanties by the railside—rickshaw-pullers, scrap-dealers, tea-stall owners, and those who sell dead bodies for a little bit of money—welcome him into their fold, life on a platform is both disillusioning and frightening at once; far more frightening than the precincts he was familiar with. This, too, is a prison, like the one he came from; that was small, and this is much larger. But no one went hungry in the jail he came from. If nothing else, one had a roof on their head, got three square meals, a blanket to sleep on.

To get away from this odd world, Imaan wishes to return to the secure existence of a prison cell. He finds out that while there is only one door to get out of prison, there are a thousand doors to return to it—like theft, murder, rioting or rape. But is Imaan up to the task? Is he capable of committing a crime?

About the Author Manoranjan Byapari writes in Bengali. Some of his important works include Chhera Chhera Jibon, Ittibrite Chandal Jibon and the Chandal Jibon trilogy. He taught himself to read and write at the age of twenty-four when he was in prison. He has worked as a rickshaw-puller, a sweeper and a porter. Until 2018, he was working as a cook at the Hellen Keller Institute for the Deaf and Blind in West Bengal. In 2018, the English translation of his memoir, Ittibrite Chandal Jibon (Interrogating My Chandal Life), received the Hindu Prize for non-fiction. In 2019, he was awarded the Gateway Lit Fest Writer of the Year Prize. Also, the English translation of his novel Batashe Baruder Gandha (There's Gunpowder in the Air) was shortlisted for the JCB Prize 2019, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019, the Crossword Prize 2019 and the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Prize 2020. The English translation of his novel Chhera Chhera Jibon (Imaan) has been longlisted for the JCB Prize 2022. He also received the Shakti Bhatt Prize this year for his body of work. In 2021, Byapari became a member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly.

About the Translator

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English. Seventy-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When the Time is Right, he has also been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee and for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize for his translation of Md Zafar Iqbal’s Rasha, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book award, USA, 2018 for his translation of Bhaskar Chakravarti’s Things That Happen and Other Poems. In 2021, his translation of Taslima Nasrin’s Shameless was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in the USA. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. Currently, he is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University, and Co-Director, Ashoka Centre for Translation.