Padma Nadir Majhi

 » Padma Nadir Majhi  » is a saga about man’s eternal struggle against hostile nature, against oppressive society, and against his own dark and irrepressible desires. Its locale is the mighty river Padma that meanders through the heart of Bengal; its characters brave boatmen who challenge its dangerous waters for survival. Set in an India before partition of 1947, it is a contemporary classic by the Bengali novelist Manik Bannerji. Around Kuber the boatman is woven an elemental tapestry of situations and characters. His crippled wife Mala, his voluptuous sister-in-law Kapila, his adventurous employer Hossain Mian, his children and his neighbours are caught in a vortex of passion and poverty, lust and love, dreams and desperation. Always, there is the river Padma, whose banks are constantly eroding and reforming, mercurial as the men who live on them. And where the river meets the sea, stands Hossain Mian’s Moina Island. Is it the promised land, the last refuge, the ultimate paradise, or yet another vortex, another inferno ?