Excerpt – The Parrot Green Saree
Whatever it may be, Bipasha knew the specificities of her thoughts and the theorization of her research. Not just the sharpness of logic, but also the fine structuring of her writing was responsible for the immense popularity of her book. Usually, books on postcolonial feminism were overburdened with complex theorization that undermined their clarity and interest. But Bipasha’s book was very readable. Bipasha was a professor of English and Creative Writing and the subject of particular interest was postcolonial literature. Other than this, she was a poet. Her poems in English had been published abroad for a long time. She already had four or five collections. But she never touched fiction.
She had tried her hand at writing a novel, experimented with it in different ways for some time, and called it The Parrot Green Saree, but hadn’t completed it. Stubbornly, driven as though by an obsession, she tried with great concentration to do her best; years passed but the writing did not proceed beyond the third chapter. She made several drafts, changed this and that, started afresh, cancelled everything to begin again….suddenly she realized and became acutely aware that she didn’t have the patience to sustain a long narrative. Neither could she find new styles to adopt. In prose, writing articles was her forte, and in that, she was an expert of the first order. She was clearly a failure as a novelist. In life, what Bipasha hated the most was failure. Those were the days of the typewriter, before the advent of the computer. She threw away the entire file of her aborted attempts at novel writing in the waste basket to feed the incinerator and wiped from her mind all traces of The Parrot Green Saree. Thus, Bipasha walked ahead in the path of life by continually erasing her past.
