One More Story About Climbing A Hill : Stories From Assam

In ‘A Night with Arpita’ a beautiful young girl in a train compartment captures the imagination of the writer—but he is unable to fathom the reason for her melancholy until it is too late. In ‘Ananta with His Seema’ three apparently disconnected incidents take place on a railway platform. Descriptions of the incidents are interspersed with passages from a letter written by Ananta’s friend that lays bare his helplessness in the face of injustice and the loss of his youthful ideals.In the eponymous story life imitates art with a disastrous twist. A young couple treks up a hillside to recreate for themselves the experience of two characters in a love story set in idyllic Shillong. But the beauty of the pine shrouded hills is marred by extremist violence and their climb to the top of the hill has an unforeseen macabre end.