Novels
Hiran, the eponymous clerk of the title, is born in 1857: the year of Mutiny and the year his father dies. Brought to Calcutta by his widowed mother he turns out to have few talents, apart from an uncanny ability to read a man's lies in his palm. When luck gets him a job at the auction house, Hiran finds himself embroiled in a mysterious trade, and even more deeply embroiled in the affairs of his nefarious superior, the infamous Mr. Jonathan Crabbe and his opium addicted wife. An unlikely hero, Hiran is caught up in rebellion and war, buffeted by storms at sea, by love and intrigue, innocently implicated in fraud and dark dealings.
Set in the Mughal court of Akbar the Great in the 16th century, this novel tells the story of Bihzad, son of the chief court painter. A child prodigy, Bihzad is groomed to take his father's place in the imperial court but the precocious and brilliant artist soon tires of imperial commissions and develops a grand and forbidden obsession. He leads a dual life — spending his nights painting the Emperor as his lover, and his days recording the Emperor's official biography in miniatures. But rumours about the wild, passionate nature of his secret drawings bring his enemies out into the open, who use his art to destroy him.
1855: on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, the most audacious experiment ever envisaged is about to begin. To settle an argument that has raged inconclusively for decades, two scientists decide to raise a pair of infants, one black, one white, on a barren island, exposed to the dangers all around them, tended only by a young nurse whose muteness renders her incapable of influencing them in any way, for good or for bad. They will grow up without speech, without civilization, without punishment or play. In this primitive environment, the children will develop as their primitive natures dictate.
Short story collections
- The Japanese Wife (Collection of short stories), 2008
An Indian man writes to a Japanese woman. She writes back. They fall in love and exchange vows in their letters, then live as man and wife without ever setting eyes on each other — their intimacy of words finally tested by life's miraculous upheavals.
The twelve stories in this collection are about the unexpected.
An American professor visits India with the purpose of committing suicide, and goes on a desert journey with the daughter of a snakecharmer. A honeymooning Indian couple is caught up in the Tiananmen Square unrest. A Russian prostitute discovers her roots in the company of Calcutta revolutionaries. A holocaust victim stands tall among strangers in a landscape of hate.
The title story of the
The Japanese Wife has been made into a film by director Aparna Sen. Narrated by the author over a casual conversation in Oxford, she found it "an improbable and hauntingly beautiful love story, almost surreal in its innocence". That, and "the potential for great visuals" was what impelled her to make the film, she said in a TV interview.
For Basu, this film represents a further tryst in his long affair with cinema, "the most magical of all the arts". He had acted in two of Mrinal Sen's films —
Punascha and
Abasheshe - as a child; and was later involved in the making of two documentaries -
Football (1980) and
The Magic Loom (1997).