A DEVASTATING CHILDHOOD MEMOIR FROM ONE OF BENGAL'S LEADING DALIT WRITER AND PUBLISHER.
A village barber’s son who migrated with his family from erstwhile East Pakistan to India in 1967 revisits his childhood in the lost land. When his father set up a hair salon in the local weekly market near their new home, it fell to the little boy to seek out customers and bring them to the shop for a haircut or a shave.
But the father was keenly aware that only an education could offer his boy a way out of the penury that had been their lot. Disappointed in his older sons who had both dropped out of school, he now pinned all his hopes on the youngest son. But school was brutal on the young boy who was always shown his ‘place’, the last bench, where he sat alone, with his cracked slate and a wet rag to wipe it clean.
His only refuge was his ailing mother, with whom he sometimes forayed into the woods and up to the outskirts of the village. They saw the world through each other’s eyes. And after her passing, he found another constant companion: Bhombol, the dog that followed him like a shadow.
The Last Bench is a poignant childhood memoir about what it means to be invisible in an unequal society, about the exchanges between man and nature, and most of all, what it means to lose those whose absence changes everything.