An exclusive excerpt from The Secret Life of Amal Gupta by Arindam Basu (Translated by Subarna Banerjee from Bengali), published by The Antonym Collections, 2026.
Amal came out on the road so he could meet a brand new day. It was 11:00 a.m. on an early spring day. The breeze was swift. Sunshine tried its best but failed to befriend the skin. Leaves and flowers rustled and rained from the nearby Krishnachura, carpeting the road that seemed to ripple playfully in the wind like a river. Buses and cars, crammed with motley-dressed people, carried them from their Dum Dum homes to downtown. From within the web of bylanes, people rushed out, not sparing a moment of attention for the river or the spring breeze.
In the middle of it all stood Amal Gupta. Hands on his hips, letting the wind tousle his salt-and-pepper tufts. He had tucked in his shirt, strapped a thick belt around his waist, and wore moccasins. But had nowhere to go, not a single destination.
For the past thirty-two years, every now and then, he had been studying Kolkata. Sometimes from Cossipore, sometimes from Baranagar, Bhowanipore, or Kudghat. He had rented houses in these neighborhoods to know the spaces inside out, to see the city from all corners. He considered Kolkata as one giant classroom. Or rather, Kolkata was the headmaster—and he, its loyal pupil. Now he mumbled under his breath—
“Amal Gupta is no milestone . . . I shall turn sixty this June. I was twenty-seven when I started writing. Now, some have come to know me as a writer; that’s all. I get invited to literary conventions sometimes. Even got a few prizes, including that famous one. Yet my books don’t sell much. I cannot write rounded stories. My novels defy structure. ‘I don’t quite get him.’ Many say, I hear.
“I think I am more of a stone grinder. I’ve always wanted to pestle myself smoothly into my writings, cooked by my own hands, following my own recipe. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
I couldn’t. But now I wonder, is there any joy even left in writing? “In the thirty-two years that I have been a writer, I have also been a husband, a father, and even a grandfather. I can say that my family is like my own novel series.
“Last year, I quit my job at the newspaper company that served more than three lakh Bengalis. I was running out of people to talk to. There was a time when I had to request and wait for my name to be called by one of their air-conditioned offices. Then the time came when that same name leaned back on one of those hairs and walked the same corridors. Occasionally had to shortlist submissions of poems or stories.
“That same name got featured in the festival issues of the magazine. It seemed like I was playacting, blowing kisses to my audiences. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, my dear fans and patrons! This year I have a brand-new show ready, just for you.’”
Such ruminations made his face droop. His lips parted, probably revealing the eight missing teeth inside. He noticed that as he stood in front of the mirror. He knew how his urine flowed weaker… a sign of waning vigor. In life as well, if happiness wilted, was it possible to write anymore? In order to write, the heart must be happy, must feel good. That was what he had been after. Writing might just be possible when one knows how to savor the joys.
Lines of poetry and plots and stories came to Amal in buses, trams, while changing footpaths, or in the mountains, jungles, or at the dinner table—rocking gently, in abrupt instants. Kamal had once teased, “You don’t need to find stories, do you, Amal?! It’s people like me who need to toil over that. You just sit with maw open wide like a boa, and novels walk right in!”
However, it was Kamal who shot to fame as a writer. He still worked at the same newspaper company. In its bestseller lists, Kamal Gupta’s name was always bound to be in the top three. People often confused Amal with Kamal. It used to hurt, even irritate Amal. He tried to correct them several times. But now, he does not bother. Instead, he plays a different game now, which fills his lungs with fun as he keeps pretending to be Kamal Gupta. Once, he had even been to a literary convention where the announcers kept addressing him as Kamal. Amal did not correct them at all.
He pretended to be Kamal. What fun! Pure, unadulterated joy! Like this, behind the curtain of his life, he carried around another identity. He could play whomever he wished, whenever he wanted to. Just thinking of that uplifted his spirit. A massive bull ambled out of the narrow Motijheel Avenue, from which Amal too walked out, to look at Dum Dum Road. As it brushed past him in grave strides to turn towards Nagerbazar, he remembered that the TV had stopped working two days back.
No sound, no picture. He could very well pay a visit to the dealer’s outlet adjacent to the bank at the Nagerbazar crossroads. As he walked to the store, a sentence fell into his mind almost with a thud. If only he could go home and pen it down. Well, never mind.
More will come soon— The way one goes beyond numbers, Towards emptiness, That is how I want to go Erasing all grand mathematics, wiped clean off the slate, To the river I want to go.
Excerpted with permissions from the author and the publisher of The Secret Life of Amal Gupta by Arindam Basu (Translated by Subarna Banerjee from Bengali), published by The Antonym Collections, 2026.
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About the Book
The mysterious, wild and ageless inner-world of the artist — swelling words, scattered stories and characters, half rendered. An endless search for the elixir: creation that outruns banality, wins death. Secret Life holds the key to the place free of all fetters that his outer life carries — years, conventions, righteousness. This is the story of Amal, the writer — a writer who desired for rebirth in creation, in love and connection, in living many lives, in defying the usual and taking flight into the wide, inexplicable skies. Arindam Basu’s masterpiece is not just a book, it is an experience. About the Story Amal Gupta is approaching sixty, a prize-winning writer whose books don’t sell much, wandering the streets of Dum Dum on a spring morning with nowhere particular to go. He has rented homes across Kolkata’s neighbourhoods for thirty-two years — Cossipore, Baranagar, Bhowanipore — treating the city as his classroom and himself as its most devoted student. Now, standing on the pavement with the wind in his salt-and-pepper hair, he wonders whether there is any joy left in writing at all. What unfolds is less a plot than a rich, roving portrait of a man in full. Amal bluffs his way through a TV repair complaint by impersonating a police officer, then a local gangster — slipping in and out of invented identities with the ease of a born actor. He haggles with his wife Gauri over figs and bathroom time with the same playful tenderness that once fuelled his finest novels. He reads a newspaper report about a sixty-year-old man who ended his life in despair, and finds himself utterly unable to relate to such purposelessness. Meanwhile, in a house not far away, a young woman named Swati has devoted an entire shelf of her bookcase to Amal Gupta’s collected works — every single one — bought with her tutoring money, read with a devotion bordering on obsession. Funny, melancholic, and shot through with poems that arrive in Amal’s mind like sudden weather, this is a novel about what it means to live a second life inside the first — the life of the imagination, the only one that truly counts.
Author’s Bio
Born in 1967 Kolkata Arindam spent some of his childhood in Assam and Asansol. He worked as a salesman and did various businesses. He started his career working as an artist at a newspaper publishing. He has been the editor of the monthly literary magazine Parashpathar and the online monthly literary magazine Sukhpath. He started writing in his mid-twenties and has published ten novels so far. He has penned more than two hundred stories, a travelogue, a collection of prose and children’s stories. He has translated stories from other Indian languages. He was awarded the ‘West Bengal Academy’ award, the ‘Namita Chatterjee Literary Award’, and the ‘Bangiya Sahitya Parishat’ award for his works. He has also received the ‘Galpasarani’ and ‘Galpasmela’ awards for his stories.
Translator’s bio
Subarna Banerjee is a writer based in Kolkata, India. She loves stories of all kinds be it in books, video games, music or on the screen but her own pen has a fondness for short stories and poems. After finishing her postgraduation in English Literature from Jadavpur University, she is currently freelancing as an editor and translator. In her spare time, she likes to scribble ideas in her journal and listen to K-pop.