Aranyak: Of the Forest

Satarchayan, the narrator of this autobiographical novel first published in India in the late '30s, is not your usual hero: he reminds me of the naive Captain Delano through whose wide, half-seeing eyes Melville’s ironic masterpiece “Benito Cereno” is told. And his story, of being sent from the metropolis of Calcutta to manage the remote, forested estates of a friend's family, is a fairly shapeless one, built on anecdotes rather than a traditional narrative. But those wide eyes make for a compelling story nevertheless, as he recalls, with a melancholy hunger, the natural beauty of the jungle and the people who wrest an unfathomably meager living out of it, even as he fulfills his assignment to clear the forests for development and thereby destroy the things he has come to love.