Register Me As Kulbhushan

Description

Traversing the streets of Calcutta in his one-and-a-half slippers, our dark, lanky hero, variously known as Bhushan (+,), Chacha, Kulbhushan (+ Jain), and Gopal Chandra Das, wanders a maze of memories, searching for himself. Like many East Bengalis scarred by the trauma of Partition, he has trained himself to dive into forgetfulness. By punching the ‘button of forgetting’, a mantra taught to him by his childhood friend Shyama Dhobi, he can induce instant amnesia and survive the suffocating, alien streets and the belittlements of his Marwari relatives, whose household drudgery he shoulders.

Shyama, too, is more than he seems. Delivered into his parents’ lap by an itinerant fakir and blessed with admirable resourcefulness, he rises through the ranks―from washerman to rickshaw-puller to trusted confidante of cotton mill-owning Bengali aristocrats―amid the mounting communal violence and brutality of the West Pakistani army that sets the stage for the Bangladesh Liberation War. When injustice becomes unbearable, he is compelled to join the freedom fighters in search of redress and meaning.

But forgetfulness has a cost. Kulbhushan abandoned his ties to his family when he formally registered his ‘refugee status’ under a Bengali pseudonym, fleeing with other impoverished, desperate refugees to a resettlement camp in the harrowing, tiger-stalked jungle of Dandakaranya in 1964. Now, as he enters his twilight years, the mysterious suicide of his adopted daughter forces him to confront memories he has long tried to erase- and the treacherous boundaries between self and other, fact and fiction, that he has juggled his entire life artfully. At once humorous, sincere, and philosophical, Register Me As Kulbhushan is a modern epic of exile and the fundamental human need to belong.