The matchbox

A stalwart among Bengali writers, Ashapurna Debi (1909–95) was one of those rare authors able to render the voice of an entire culture, to capture its nuances and most abiding traditions with startling precision and formidable insight. Each of the twenty-one stories in Matchbox, carefully selected from Ashapurna Debi’s extensive body of work and brilliantly translated from Bengali to retain the original flavour of the language and Debi’s style, highlights the tensions inherent in a society of close-knit and interdependent families. In ‘Poddolota’s Dream’, a young girl returns to the scene of…