“Aruni captures the historical silence that has, over the years, eluded many writers.”
It is 2002 and young Pablo, a city boy who has mostly lived a sheltered and privileged life in Guwahati, is visiting his ancestral village for his aunt’s wedding. This is his second time in Mayong, in rural Assam, since 1998, when he had come for a few days to attend his father’s best friend’s funeral. As the wedding preparations gather pace, Pablo is amused as well as disturbed by squabbling aunts, dying grandmothers, cousins planning to elope for love and hysterical gossips. And on this heady theatre of tradition and modernity hovers the sinister shadow of insurgency and the army’s brutal measures to quell militancy. In the days leading up to the wedding, which ends in an unspeakable tragedy, Pablo finds first love, discovers family intrigues and goes through an extraordinary rite of passage. Written with clinical precision, this gripping first novel announces the arrival of one of the most original voices from India’s North-East.
Praise for:
THE HOUSE WITH A THOUSAND STORIES
“Amazing talent from one so young!”
“[An] abiding sense of hurt and separateness from the Indian state permeates The House with a Thousand Stories... [Kashyap’s] tactile prose, beautifully flawed characters …brings to life and empathy a little-known corner of the region.”
“In Kashyap’s crumbling House, is the beating heart of Assam; in its belly its termites, its conflicts, its dogs that lay eggs, its stunning fireflies, its dangerous gossip, the disintegrating spines of its own histories. Beside it is the Brahmaputra, the river that veers towards the villages it loves, consumes them whole as emblematic of Kashyap’s House’s stories of love that end in disaster. The House with a Thousand Stories is the complex tale of an India rarely seen outside North East India, scarcely spoken about, making Kashyap’s debut a courageous and necessary one.”
“Aruni Kashyap’s narrative prose has the compulsive assurance of a master story teller.”
“Beautiful and devastatingly torn… Kashyap leaves us with something sparkling in this wreckage—a quality common to all great tragedies. A novel to savor.”
“In this profoundly moving first novel, Aruni Kashyap has drawn a portrait of contemporary Assam that is suffused with tenderness for a once gentle land now torn apart by violence. With finely honed sensitivity and exquisite skill, he has achieved the remarkable by illuminating the narrative with a luminous hope that captures all that is still magical in this war-torn land on the edge of the country. A refreshingly original voice, Kashyap is a writer to watch out for”
“It is remarkable that Kashyap has been able to weave the theme of the insurgency and the consequent extrajudicial killings in Assam in the 1990s deftly into the everyday lives of his protagonists.”
“A novel often affects the way we look at a place or a people. Aruni Kashyap’s novel will certainly change the way we look at Assam.”
“There are very few works of fiction in the English literature that have managed to portray the pain and suffering of the people of the Northeast as Aruni Kashyap’s novel.”
“There is much to be admired about Aruni Kashyap’s debut novel, but it is most impressive in its adept juggling of the personal with the political. ”
“...voices the story of a land torn by violence. ...This is a great debut novel.”
“An achievement for a first novel.”