Raiiq Ridwan
“Fulkumari” is a luminous river of prose flowing through time, memory, and identity. Vivid in its details and fluid in its rhythm, each chapter, though brief, carries the weight of history, philosophy, and personal reflection—woven seamlessly into an intimate tapestry.
Dr. Pinaki Bhattacharya invites us into the stillness of his solitude—locked down in Paris during COVID, exiled yet again, adrift in the echoes of his own past. However, this is no passive solitude; it is a whirlwind of thoughts that journeys through history, Hindu religious texts, political ideologies, poetry, drama, and culture, all intertwined with the haunting reality of being a refugee—not once, but twice. Due to the nature of my work as an Emergency Medicine doctor, COVID is a painful memory and I was also transported back to those days as I read this deeply personal account.
It is a tale of displacement, of belonging and unbelonging, of exile that stretches across continents and decades. The narrative is not linear but a mosaic, threading together the harrowing experience of his present exile in Paris with the distant but ever-present spectre of 1971, when he was first a refugee in India. In between, he shares stories of his life, family, the cities he has lived in, the people he befriended, the events that shaped his thinking and his thoughts on various events.
At the heart of this lonely, contemplative world, there is an unlikely companion—Fulkumari, a rat that visits his Parisian apartment. In naming her, in observing her, he forges a delicate bond, a metaphor for survival, for companionship in exile, for the small yet significant connections that tether us to the world even in our loneliest moments.
“Fulkumari” is a symphony of thought and experience, of pain and resilience, of loss and remembrance. It not only tells a story; it lingers in the mind.
The book is small, 141 pages, but there is an abundance of information. The only criticisms I would have is that some of the chapters felt quite abrupt and the price remains quite prohibitive. However, it has been a companion of my commutes for the past four days.
I don’t know if he remembers, but Pinaki uncle bought my sister her first Bengali novel about a decade or so ago from Baatighar Chattogram — Feluda.
