If the world is a stage, all men and women are players, the post-modern novelist and poet Sabarna Roy played his role well with ink, pen, paper and imagination.
This author of five bestselling books initiated a new trend in Indian English literature that is influencing other writers too.
This technocrat-turned author is known for analyzing voluptuousness of the present industrial society and mankind’s quest to find solace, peace in the urban concrete jungle.
We find all his works, including the poems, are unconventional and deals with human reality focusing implicit issues like greed, benevolence, love, lust and betrayal.
These are acting in tandem with the turbulence of post-modern era where life’s natural ethics nurtured for centuries together are eroding fast. Naturally, mankind is tormented.
Man Is The Measure of Everything
Paragraphs of each one of the five books of Sabarna sail so smoothly that even their inner meanings are understandable to all. The meaning is clear: mankind’s psyche is the ultimate yardstick for their behavioral pattern.
Beginning with Pentacles, his first literary venture, all other four works tried to establish that Man is the Measure of Everything!
On the post-modern literary platter, Sabarna gave us five foods for thought. They are: Pentacles, Frosted Glass, Abyss, "Winter Poems and Random Subterranean Mosaic 2012 – 2018 - Time frozen in myriad thoughts.
Reading Five Books Means Churning Five Oceans
The most effective contributory factor towards establishing Sabarna as a bestselling author is his extraordinary capacity to spin his own views on global order and individual efforts to find their places in it.
This is more so as mankind is a social animal. Being basically gregarious in nature, mankind cannot live without a cluster, group. Naturally, competition, conflict becomes the center point of their existence. In it, emotion plays the supreme role.
Basic instincts, bestiality, kindness, greed and outburst of emotions of mankind remain unchanged since they began their lives as cavemen.
Take Pentacles mirroring author’s view of life through a long story and four long narrative poems. The story’s protagonist, a successful man yet suffers from internal pangs as his mother left him for the love of another man when he was very young.
Frosted Glass, his second book consisting one story cycle comprising 14- long-short stories and one poem cycle comprising 21- lyrical narrative poems, shows the serpentine course of life mankind is destined to follow.
His third book Abyss is an engrossing crime thriller full of gritty suspense showing crescendo of conflicts between personalities and ideas ending with an unnatural death before the interval. Is it a suicide or a murder? Renuka, the female sleuth, plays her wonderful role.
Winter Poems, his fourth book, an anthology of poems consisting Winter Poems – 2010 and Winter Poems – 2012, sketches the imaginations of death and home questioning what would the pleasure of living be without the imagination of death and pleasure of running through wilderness be without the imagination of home?
His fifth book published in 2019 Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012 - 2018 Time Frozen in Myriad Thoughts, published in 2019 is a combination of ideas, political opinions, tiny stories, letters, conversations, travelogues and food articles.
They are distinctly different from each other yet curiously stringed to each other like a mysterious chain of unique flowers.
Now the readers would not have Sabarna’s sixth title is going to hit the bookstores very shortly. This work is likely to create a storm in the literary world as it deals with a totally unconventional subject: certainty of uncertainty in life.
Profiling A Poet, A Novelist
Sabarna, passing out from Jadavpur University in 1988, started writing in his university days, mostly English and Bengali poems. For two years, while he was in the university, he edited the Bengali Poetry Journal, titled: Mohana.
He stopped writing after leaving university and taking up employment. After a gap of 19 years, he again started writing mostly to reconnect with himself. During the period he did not write, he spent his non-working hours reading, listening to music and watching world cinema.
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