Remembering writer Nabarun Bhattacharyam, the man who was a great worshipper of the absurd

How does one praise a man whom so few have heard of ? For writer Nabarun Bhattacharya, who passed away on Thursday, that would have been a rollicking challenge. Bhattacharya’s reputation as a chronicler and jar-trapper of anarchy has been limited. But this is a country where unless you are feted by some Anglo-US jury or held aloft as a megaphone for the Youth, the chances of you being known are laughably bleak. Laughter and bleakness made Bhattacharya’s ready mix. His 1994 novel Herbert, dealing with its eponymous protagonist running a “business” of connecting clients to the spirits of their dead loved ones, is two-parts tragic, one-part comic. If it was the other way round, Bhattacharya never let it out. His anarcho-comic characters, the Fyatarus, are ordinary men and women. Except that they’re equipped with the perfectly extraordinary ability to flap their wings and fly and engage in antisocial mayhem across town.

Bhattacharya was a devotee of the absurd. The comic and the tragic, as in the works of writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov and Gogol that he admired, were partners in crime in his writings. That he “chose” 4:20 as a time in the afternoon to die bears to this. What doesn’t is that shockingly, but unsurprisingly, you’ve not heard of, never mind read, one of India’s most powerful contemporary writers.