Wani Nazir
“When a poet of the calibre of Rajkamal Choudhary turns his attention to prose, it is natural that the timbre and tone of the text will be extraordinary. Like his poetry, his fiction too is layered, lyrical, multifarious, rich in imagery and eloquent in symbolism, retaining the same poetic sensibility.” This is how Mahua Sen kicks off her Translator’s Preface to The Dead Fish, published by Rupa Publications, India.
Translation is not a process hands down. The music, the tone, and even the quiet must all resonate. In the case of Machhali Mari Hui, the original work by Rajkamal Choudhary, it is not just about accepting and relocating the words. It is the air you are breathing, the narrow alleys of Calcutta you are walking through, the tiredness you are feeling, and the times when you feel empathy that surprise you while translating it into English. Besides, Choudhary writes in a poetic way, using curves and metaphors. Like in poems, his sentences get longer till they break. Therefore, the translator must know when to let things settle and when to let them flow like a murmuring stream through the pages. Sen succeeds in translating the ache of longing, and the loneliness that are bracketed together. This isn’t really a jitter; it is more of a strong jolt—the voice giving birth to another voice.
Things don’t settle in The Dead Fish. Everything seems to be moving about. Then, at various places, in the middle of a sentence or while half-standing by a stone pillar in her bedroom, she would say, “Who might have come at this odd hour? Who might this person be? What kind of a mask?” It feels like that questions echo in every corner and interaction. In Choudhary’s world, masks are more than simply masks; they are life. They are placed on the city, the body, and the soul. Sen’s translation lets us hear the muted cries coming from under the masks.
For instance, Priya is one of Choudhary’s many women. He paints her with a certain amount of remoteness. “She is not inclined towards hanging out with college boys. She stays aloof, reticent and unapproachable to others. Even though Priya has inherited her mother’s temperament, her personality is more like her father’s.” The redundancy and the almost-exhausted observation are both there, in all their quiet strength and soft resistance. Choudhary’s women often keep their resistance close, but they are nonetheless haunted by the problems they have inherited.
Calcutta isn’t just a setting in this book; it is a live creature that pulls and pushes on everyone. Japanese tourist Tako Yushikura has written in his travel memoirs (1950), that “despite being so small, there is no other city in the world that has such a magnificent street. Park Street is a little street—it begins at the life-size bronze statue of Gandhiji in Chowringhee, meandering through Free School Street and Lower Circular Road, and ends there.”The city’s streets are like a map of pride and broken dreams, with old colonial ghosts and the promise of money washing away their colour. It is hard for any translation to take you to this place because each street name has a sound and a whole history to it.
Read more, you discern that Choudhary doesn’t write about real life in the usual way; his world is strange and frenetic. The holy and the vile walk hand in hand. Sometimes a prayer turns into a protest: “Prayers that are still prayers and have not devolved into grievances or abuses. Though prayers are uttered, the morning lacks its usual serenity, and the atmosphere is devoid of the right conditions for such sacred offerings.” Sen has a hard job expressing that tilt, when faith turns into irony. In English, the sentence shakes with respect, but you can sense that faith is already draining out, choked by modern existence.
Choudhary’s world is full of shattered men—intellectuals, businessmen, reporters, and politicians—who are all dealing with the same disappointment. Nirmal Padmavat, possibly his most interesting character, is torn between feeling sorry for himself and wanting to be great. And there is a moment: “Dr Raghuvansh did not ask any questions regarding his identity after this, not even his name. They sat quietly. Nirmal ordered a full bottle of Old Smuggler and kept the doctor company.” The bottle, the quiet, and the lack of a name all show a certain kind of disorder. Sen is very careful to keep the rhythm of his original; pauses are important, and silence expresses what words can’t.
Choudhary’s Calcutta is full of strange, almost horrific pictures of modern life. Picture this: “Tens of thousands of people have fallen asleep with their heads resting on the ticket windows of cinema halls. The dome of the Ochterlony Monument is adorned with thousands of gallows, resembling balance scales, from which dangle miniature houses, radiograms, whisky bottles and heaps of government files tethered by both small and large ropes.” It is really crazy. The pictures make language, reasoning, and they break at their edge. If you are interpreting this, you cannot try to make it make sense. You have to go by texture and take the crazy at its word.
The text goes back and forth between personal and political. At one point, you see: “Hunger, cancer snug between the hips, papers full of half-naked girls, Kali Temple, fifty-three Kali Temples, furriner tourists glued to their binoculars and cameras…”Hunger comes back, and before you know it, you are sick of metropolitan life as disease. The translation by Mahua Sen doesn’t clear things up. You can taste the bitterness and feel every sharp edge.
Choudhary’s world of businesspeople and officials offers a window into a country that is changing: “Industrialist Prabhas Babu, the visionary who foresaw these developments, had refrained from forming alliances with any foreign power or capital… Like the old feudal lords, he had a monopoly in his business.”Choudhary uses people like him, who are in between classes and have strange ideas, to show that feudalism never dies; it just puts on a suit and calls itself capitalism. The translator has to convey over not only the meaning but also the tone, the subtle satire and the cold edge.
Nirmal is one of the men on these pages, and they all seem to be lost: “After running away from the village, Nirmal went straight to Karachi. From Karachi to Lahore… He earned his livelihood by washing dishes in a Muslim hotel in Sialkot.”The story moves about a lot and goes from place to place, as if Nirmal is running away from something inside of him. The translation keeps it simple, which lets the journey show how restless he is.
The women—Kamala, Kalyani, Shirin, and Priya—are wired differently. They are tough. They hurt. “Kamala used to be the most celebrated dancer and singer in Calcutta in those days…. Despite Kalyani’s modern demeanour, Hilton Sahab treated her with disrespect… She asserted bluntly, ‘I don’t drink coffee. Only whisky; though I prefer rum.’”These women are not symbols. They have their own scars and needs. In other words, they take courage. You don’t stand them down or say you are sorry for how sharp they are. Nirmal’s tragedy is that he never becomes entire. He had never gotten the love and care of a man or woman in his life. He could not become a whole person; perhaps he was always missing something.
But every connection, including his daughter, Kalyani, and Shirin, merely throws that emptiness back at him. “Nirmal stood up. Without asking Kalyani, he closed the door from inside.”You don’t sense lust; you feel desperation—a broken man reaching for connection in a world that has nothing to offer him.
Mahua Sen has a kind touch in these times, letting them hurt a little. Choudhary’s sex scenes are explicit at times, yet they are always based on real, corporeal people. “Kalyani emerged from the bathroom. Nirmal Padmavat saw a pair of bare feet, white as snow… He could not muster the courage to look up.” It is more than sex; it’s raw, shaky recognition—beauty mixed with fear. “Nirmal Padmavat dove onto the bed like a starving wolf’s cub… Kalyani was grinning from ear to ear, while resisting him.” You need to be humble and precise to translate this. Don’t try to change the story to fit a pre-existing dramatic one; let the bodies speak. And then, all of a sudden, passion is gone. “Nirmal felt miserable, as numerous memories of Kalyani chased him… He felt as if all the happiness had been sucked out of his life.” You don’t have to use fancy words here. It is clear that something is missing, and the translator’s job is to make that emptiness echo.
The whole book is a snow job about power and decadence. In this world, “honesty had now become a commodity to be traded… Political parties were being bought. Ministries could be bought. If one had enough money and wisdom, the entire world could be bought.” Long before people started to worry about it, Choudhary recognised this moral rot approaching.
The translator’s responsibility is to keep that disgustingness in English and not let the fury fade away. You may still find these sparks of poetry, even as the disastrous wrecks everything. “Every small road eventually merges with a big road. Following every small intersection, there is a big one.” Not just in city streets, but how life spills over, bigger and dirtier than we think. The translator merely needs to keep the music in Choudhary’s lines and let them play.
Choudhary’s irony often comes back to haunt him. He says, “People fight for absurd reasons and in strange circumstances… There comes a time when people start taking pleasure in defeating themselves. For defeat becomes their habit, their solitary joy.” You can almost hear Nirmal repeating these remarks, a character so caught up in his own mistakes that they become him. To translate phrases like this, you can’t only change the words; you have to feel the sigh that is between the lines.
The end of the book is quite sad. Priya licks her dry lips with her tongue. Clothes are saturated with blood and alcohol. And then: “Priya sticks out her tongue to dampen her parched lips… Clothes are soaked with alcohol and blood.” Later, “When she reached her father’s room, the death certificate was being drafted. Dr Raghuvansh had died of a brain haemorrhage.” Mahua Sen translates all of this into English with a calmness. Not a cheap drama, but the real pain of loss. It hurts and is bitter, but it somehow hits you in the chest and a little beyond, like you’re looking at it through fogged glass. This is presumably how trauma always comes back: never fully healed, always a little worn.
But even in the middle of all this darkness, there is a glimpse of grace. “Shirin is praying to her Almighty that whatever had happened in the past must not be repeated. Not again, for this one time at least! She is praying with all her heart.” Prayer, which had seemed ironic before, now seems like something softer: redemption. And then, in the very end, Choudhary leaves us with a line that makes us want to cry: “Shirin Padmavat! Shirin had been born. Now she won’t die. Love dies. Lust dies. Not compassion. Only compassion never dies.” The last portion isn’t just the end of the story; it is also the main point of the complete book. It can be translated since it comes from a place that is beyond words. You cannot put labels on compassion and put it in a drawer. However, every time you translate something, you are showing compassion in some way.
Mahua Sen’s The Dead Fish is proof of this: even when words shift or fade away for a while, the heart of a story keeps pounding in another tongue. Choudhary’s writing is always moving. It talks about desire in a frank way, criticises sharply, and is heavy with loneliness. His phrases go back and forth between the holy and the crass, the recollection and the fever dream.
It is the strange parts that make a good narrative fantastic. Stay weird. Give it some air. It is so onerous a task to translate Rajkamal Choudhary because you have to deal the phrases that ache like open bruises, and sentences that cut the sinews. It is something that resonates with stillness, and yearns for the unreachable. Choudhary’s world is still very much alive in Sen. When a book is translated into another language, it doesn’t get smaller. It gets deeper, like a mirror that shakes at the top of water that has been shaken.
The Dead Fish can be purchased here.
A postgraduate gold medalist in English Literature from the University of Kashmir in Srinagar, Wani Nazir, from Pulwama, India, is the author of the poetic collections, …and the silence whispered and The Chill in the Bones. Presently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, Jammu and Kashmir, he has been writing both prose and poetry in English, Urdu, and his mother tongue, Kashmiri. Wani has poetry and prose in Kashur Qalam, The Significant League, Muse India, Setu, Langlit, Literary Herald, Cafe Dissensus, Learning and Creativity – Silhouette Magazine, The Dialogue Times, and elsewhere.
Grateful!