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ILLICITBy Dibyendu PalitPenguin Price: Rs 150, Pages: 122
THERE WAS NO ONE AT THE BUS STOPBy Sirshendu MukhopadhyayPenguin Price: Rs 150, Pages: 121
Two women, portrayed by two writers. Both belong to the same city and milieu, upper middle-class Kolkata. Both have nearly everything-well-off husbands, well-appointed homes, lives of leisure.
Yet through cracks in the comfortable monotony of their lives, loneliness seeps in, time hangs heavy. As they struggle to play out their roles, the craving for something new starts. The jagged edges of that craving begin to soften as they find love, or some version of it, with strangers who enter their lives.
Forty-three years after Buddhadeva Bose's novel, It Rained all Night, opened with a woman's frank assertion, "I did it", adultery is hardly a novel word in the world of Bangla literature.
But Dibyendu...