Book Review: Floating Towel and a Dozen Stories
Voices of socially disempowered hegemonic positions Gautam Maitra, a bilingual writer is a prolific storyteller in weaving stories that are a kaleidoscope to life with objective experiences only to give us a myriad vision of the Indianness that strives for existence. Set in the turmoils of South Asia, Floating Towel and a dozen Short Stories visualizes the trajectory of family relationships, disenchantment, violence, greed, the changing lifetimes and abject senselessness of fanaticism. It is a fabric of a middle-class person namely Budhu, an archetype, an epitome of normalcy – a person so deeply rooted in the attitudes, customs and feelings of a native Bengali middle-class man that it could essentially be an alter-ego of any Indian Joe. Maitra’s Floating Towel and a dozen Short Stories, a compilation of various short stories that were written across the span of two decades, is divided into twelve chapters with the life and times of the protagonist Budhu in the depiction of existential