APARANHARA BHOOTA

                                                  (An Afternoon’s Ghost)

Aparanhara Bhoota is my first book, published in 1999.

It was difficult to find a publisher to publish a book, more so for a new writer, and still it is. Dr. Prafulla Kumar Rath of Nijaswa Prakasan, Puri expressed his desire to publish my book. We had not met, but known each other through letters.

I was treasury officer of Satyabadi Sub Treasury. I walked to the office from my res; it was a fifteen minutes walk. Every day without fail I noticed an old woman cooking her food on the roadside in front of the bank. In the rainy days she cooked in the corner of the veranda of the bank. She made a makeshift oven with three bricks, used old cycle tyre or sticks and dried leaves fallen from trees as fuel and cooked in an aluminium utensil. She slept on the veranda of the bank, used pond water for her ablution, begged for her food in the small bazaar. She was dark skinned, she wore rags and tatters. Neither she bothered anyone, nor did anyone bother her. I asked my colleagues and some others about her, but nobody knew anything except that she was not from the locality, had come from outside, and from where no one had any idea. No one had heard her speaking, the language she spoke was not even known. One day she died. A few young men volunteered to cremate her and collected money. They had come to me for donation.

I wrote a story on her, it was published in Ravivar, the Sunday magazine of Sambad, under the caption Kalibudhi (The Dark-skinned Old Woman). I had received a few letters of appreciation for the story. One of the letters I had received was from Dr. Prafulla Kumar Rath, Reader in Odia, SCS College, Puri. He had a publishing unit.

Dr Rath appreciated the story, but suggested the language of the story should be of that spoken by the lower class people as the story was on a beggar woman. I replied, since the story was narrated through an officer, so the language should be and it was, as spoken by an educated person.

We did not have further correspondence. After about four years I met him in Rourkela. He had gone to participate in the NBT organised book fair and I participated in a workshop on story, also organised by NBT. There he proposed to publish my first book.

The book contains twelve stories. Asit Mukherjee has designed the cover. The book was released in Puri by Shantanu Kumar Acharya in presence of Bijay Krushna Mohanty and Gourahari Das. The event was organised by my friend, poet Pradeep Biswal, then Commercial Tax Officer, Puri. Gourahari had discussed the stories of the book. The book was priced at Rs.35.

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