ABSTRACT
The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die is a ghost story about three generations of women but by a male Bengali novelist Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay who also deals with feminine sexuality but also more light-heartedly than Indira Goswami. It is about a family in North Bengal that came over from the east in 1947. The novel is in four parts: two being narrated by Somlata, who is from the second generation, and two by her daughter Boshon. The men in the family are an idle lot and Somlata, with help from the ghost of Pishi and her jewellery box, her husband’s aunt, manages to embark upon a successful business. There is a suggestion that Boshon is Pishi reborn since she has the same desires. This implies that women have been the same across generations. Another factor is that while the men flaunt mistresses, the sexuality of the women remains (comically) unfulfilled. Pishi has desired a manservant but that is treated as a comic aside and her ‘virtue’ is preserved. The absence of a historical context (except Partition) is also important and it is as though 50 years of socio-political turbulence made no impact upon the narrative. The chapter speculates on why two novels (this and another one by Mahasweta Devi) dealing with the same historical period do not acknowledge each other’s worlds.
