Reading Nabarun Bhattacharya is not like reading most writers. There is no easing in, no settling, no polite literary handshake at the door. He grabs you by the collar from the first page with the specific, unfiltered fury of someone who has looked at the world very clearly for a very long time and refused to pretend that what he saw was acceptable. Hawa Hawa carries that fury in every line, and it is one of the most alive, most discomfiting, most stubbornly itself pieces of Bengali writing I have come across.

Nabarun belongs to a tradition of Bengali literature that refuses respectability. He came after Manik, after Subimal, and he carried something forward from both of them while being entirely his own thing. The Calcutta in his writing is not the Calcutta of nostalgia or the Calcutta of literary romance. It is the city of the footpath and the margin, of the people the official story of Bengali culture prefers to step over, rendered with an affection so fierce it reads as indistinguishable from rage.

Hawa Hawa moves through this world with the rhythm of something between a prose poem and a fever. There is no conventional plot architecture here in the sense that most readers come trained to expect. What there is instead is accumulation, image pressing against image, voice against voice, the absurd folded into the real so completely that the fold becomes invisible. You stop asking what is literal and what is not. Nabarun is not interested in that distinction and the writing makes that clear early.

This is where the book demands something particular from the reader, and also where it gives back the most. Nabarun's Bengali is not the cleaned-up, grammatically proper Bengali of establishment literature. It is the language of the street, of the addas, of the back lanes, of people who were never invited into the drawing room version of the culture and made their own version accordingly. The slang is specific. The register shifts without warning. The humour is dark and physical and arrives in places you do not expect it.

For readers who grew up with that language, or near it, there is a recognition that lands like something coming home. For readers approaching in translation, some of that texture inevitably thins. Nabarun is one of those writers whose full force lives in the original, and I say this not to discourage but to say that even at partial force, what comes through is considerable.

Nabarun was a committed leftist and it shows, but not in the way that political commitment usually shows in fiction, as argument, as message, as characters who exist to demonstrate a position. His politics live in the structure of his attention. In who he looks at. In who gets to be a full human being in his pages. In the complete absence of any impulse to sentimentalise the poor or make their suffering picturesque.

The anger in Hawa Hawa is not righteous anger performing itself for approval. It is the quieter, more corrosive anger of someone who has watched the same injustices cycle through the same city for decades and has stopped expecting anything different and writes about it anyway, because writing about it is the one form of refusal available.

Nabarun's style, which is the most thrilling thing about him, is also where the book occasionally loses its footing for me. The deliberate rejection of conventional structure is a statement of intent and I respect it completely. But there are passages in Hawa Hawa where the associative leaping, the refusal to anchor, tips from exhilarating into something that kept me at a remove when I wanted to be fully inside it. The boundary between formally daring and formally sealed against the reader is a fine one, and Nabarun crosses it a handful of times.

That is not a reason to stay away. It is a reason to read with patience and surrender some of the usual reading habits at the door. The book rewards both.

What I carry from this book is less specific than a scene or a character. It is more like a residue, a particular quality of vision that Nabarun leaves behind. A way of looking at a city and seeing all the people in it that the city's self-image refuses to include. A reminder that literature does not have to be comfortable to be full of love. That the sharpest, most unaccommodating writing sometimes comes from the deepest place of caring about the world it is skewering.

Nabarun did not write to be liked. He wrote to be true. In Hawa Hawa he is both and the combination is something worth sitting with.

Rating: ★★★★ 4 / 5 stars

For readers drawn to: Manik Bandyopadhyay, Subimal Misra, Phanishwar Nath Renu, and anyone who has ever wanted Bengali literature to stop being polite and start being honest.