Between reality and fantasy
Ali Ahmed is intrigued by an unusual work
I was not surprised when presented with a printed copy of Amiya Sadnam Chowdury's debut English novella Wings as I had earlier had an opportunity to have a glimpse of the typed manuscript. What really surprised me was this young writer's grasp of the English language as it is not his mother tongue, nor was he brought up, as far as I know, in an ambience where this foreign language could be a part of his being. But it's not just the language of the novella that kept me almost glued to its pages. His very attractive art of storytelling pulled me along the pages of the rather slim volume of this novella. The story opens in a semi-deserted, late night street of an unnamed city, probably Dhaka, and the protagonist, Arnab Hassan, an Oxford physicist, walks the streets for nearly half an hour to reach a lake and meet another man there. They go together to a nearby all-night coffee shop, get stranded there by rains and thunderclaps and Arnab Hassan starts narrating the story to his barely-known companion. The entire story spins around Oxford, where Arnab Hassan teaches, and revolves round a multi-billionaire Irish industrialist, Edward Lark. This hard-to-define complex character, getting drawn to Dr. Hassan after reading a couple of his articles in a journal, approaches him to make him a pair of wings to fly with. This, as could easily be imagined, is not a fantasy, nor is it a fancy of the super-rich, who offers Hassan up to fifty billion dollars for the project. Edward Lark takes the reader back to the days of his tormented childhood in Ireland, where his morbid fear of spiders first drove into his brains the fantasy of flying with his own wings to escape those creeping insects and the fantasy has stuck there since. Arnab Hassan's acceptance of the offer provides the story with an unbelievable twist. An Oxford physicist, providing occasional glimpses to the reader almost throughout the entire length of the story of his disbelief in the practicality of the project, accepts the offer nonetheless and launches the mad venture. The climax to the story comes when Lark arrives on a rather windy midnight. They both conspire to lie to Arnab's wife to get out of the house and to the roof of a twenty-seven-storied hotel building of Lark's. There the pair of hitherto-untested wings are put on two sides of Lark and, after some hesitation, he is pushed from the cornices of the roof to the windy voids of a dark night. Arnab hurries down the lift, enlists the support of the ground-floor night guard and together they rush to the nearby lake in Lark's very expensive car. And Lark, lo and behold, appears overhead in the rainswept and heavily windy sky! He cannot reach the nearby lake, as originally hoped for, and falls to the ground. The result is a predictable smashing of a few of his body bones and he is taken to hospital. He survives, and the story, for all practical purposes, ends there. Amiya Sadnam Chowdhury's story, though it promises to be a thriller or a ghost story when it opens after midnight in a nearly vacant lakeside, turns out, finally, to be an unusual tale of two diseased minds, namely, those of Arnab and Edward. Edward's childhood fright of spiders lingers on in his psyche, pushing him to the point of insanity. His reckless pursuit of the dreadful fancy of winged flights stares probable death straight in the face while Arnab's not-so-secret collaboration in the impossible task bares his contorted soul. The writer very skillfully portrays their complex characters through a rather simple tale. The novelist's eye for detail and his capacity to present the reader with a rather unbelievable flight of fancy in a thoroughly realistic manner speak eloquently of his power of writing. His use of apt references in appropriate places of the narrative interspersed with wit and humour reveals a surprising depth of his reading and of a very intelligent mind. This debut novella of Amiya Sadnam Chowdhury is, no doubt, a remarkable addition to our rather narrow stream of original English writings. It truly deserves a wide readership.
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