Book Review: Rukhsat by Sujit Banerjee

Rukhsat, The Departure by Sujit Banerjee contain twenty-six short stories with twenty-six such characters who take you into the bubbly mysterious alcove of the mind. Here the identical narrative comes animate in two different ways, through two different protagonists with stories suspended between mystery, that speak to us of the evils of the soul, and the hidden follies.

The book is condensed in property forms of merciless revenge, love and hate to murky and criminal events from many faces. They are sometimes improbable and sometimes ruthless with experiments to limit the nightmare with myriad characters. There is the determined prostitute to the guy on the railway station bereft of any memory. There is a lady anxious for a baby to a departed man’s trial. There is a green-eyed lover with a perverted brain to a gay man’s reminiscence of a one-night encounter.

This is a unique anthology of its kind with a literary project that usher in a new era of nightmares for readers who will have the courage to read these black seduction pearls. These stories could have been called the fantastic and the grotesque that oscillate between madness and obsession.

Here you will find morbid thoughts that you could look out at the insane minds and beyond and worrying expression of an inner discomfort. It becomes an inspiration too fast because of the web with a series of stories of very few pages that catapult into a parallel world. They are sometimes all too real, in which there are no rules or morality. It is here that fears and anxieties emerge and succeed in making you feel fragile and a vulnerable player.

With well-written stories, flowing flawlessly the book has a succession of emotions, unexpected and final implications abandoned to the reader. There are issues, mainly, dramatic and frightening described with irony with very compelling stories, structured to entice the reader to read them with dynamism.

The formula is recurrent from a daily and seemingly normal situation, in which suddenly takes the typical distortion of the stories that surround thriller themes. In addition most of them are open-ended, where the writer gives you, during the story, all the elements to get to guess the conclusion.

The central themes of the collection are, in fact, tragic and pessimistic, where there is certain complacency. The author, inflict such a misfortune against the characters and the same player, to get into the mind of uncomfortable protagonists who reactivate old themes. The author composes an anthology that contains genres and atmospheres completely different but equally enjoyable and accessible for creativity and style.

There are two aspects that most stand out in the book. The first consists of the author's unique style, especially concerning the choices of the various ending of the stories. It will manage to unsettle the reader managing not to make him guess anything before. The first account can give a sense of anguish indescribable at the end of the reading. The second can be put in the same type of precedent and leaves us, albeit in a less exuberant manner the same feelings that causes the end of the first story.

The reading remains pleasantly smooth and what transpires from the novel is in fact precisely the message that nobody is as it seems. Each of us hides a part of our character, of being invisible to most people, which stagnates in the dusk, and that comes to light only when and if it is discovered.