Nowhere People

About the Book

FROM THE WRITER OF THERE'S GUNPOWDER IN THE AIR AND IMAAN. 

Nowhere People chronicles the lives of people living in squatter settlements. They are there and not there. Some have fathers, but no mothers. Some have mothers, but no fathers. And some have neither. And then, some have both, but who are absent from their lives.

As if they live only to perish one day. Their only occupation is to somehow stay alive. Some drive rickshaws, some run errands, some collect scrap, some wash glasses at a hooch shop, and some scale fish at the fish market.

Many uprooted, penniless, vulnerable people, like rickshaw driver Nobo and his friends, live at the Jadavpur station. It is on this heartless soil that delicate saplings spring sometimes.

Nobo's life takes an unexpected turn when he spots an infant abandoned at the station. Although his friends occasionally lend a hand, it falls to Nobo to take care of the baby.

This is Nobo's story.

About the Author

Manoranjan Byapari writes in Bengali. Some of his important works include Chhera Chhera Jibon, Ittibrite Chandal Jibon and the Chandal Jibon Trilogy. He taught himself to read and write at the age of twenty-four when he was in prison. He has worked as a rickshaw-puller, a sweeper and a porter. Until 2018, he was working as a cook at the Hellen Keller Institute for the Deaf and Blind in West Bengal.

In 2018, the English translation of his memoir, Ittibrite Chandal Jibon (Interrogating My Chandal Life), received the Hindu Prize for non-fiction. In 2019, he was awarded the Gateway Lit Fest Writer of the Year Prize. Also, the English translation of his novel Batashe Baruder Gandha (There's Gunpowder in the Air) was shortlisted for the JCB Prize 2019, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019, the Crossword Prize 2019 and the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Prize 2020.