ABSTRACT
The story, which unfolds like a Greek tragedy, with the primary characters appearing and disappearing from the stage, and with the narrator and her friend acting like a chorus, reveals the human cost of the insurgency that plagued the state in the 1990s. But, like all Goswami’s works, the story is filled with several other pertinent issues, poverty, displacement from flood, human-animal conflict and so on. In the present extract, we meet an elderly couple running a teashop on the road near the Kaziranga wildlife sanctuary. As the narrator and her friend stop there after their car breaks down, between the old couple’s bickering and bantering, Goswami unveils a lifetime of trauma and tragedy.
