Authentic Memory

The growing silence between father and son becomes almost a theme in its own right in Jey Sushil's Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai

- By Ravinder Kumar

JEY Sushil’s Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai is a profoundly moving memoir that begins as a son’s attempt to grapple with the grief and memories that follow the death of his father and gradually expands into a rich social portrait of postcolonial India. It is about remembrance—of a father’s presence and absence, of sweetness and bitterness, closeness and distance—and about a son’s effort to draw, through his own family’s story, a larger sketch of a newly independent nation, its dreams, aspirations, and transformations.

At its core, the memoir is the story of Sushil’s father, a man born in a small village in Bihar, who spent his life working in the uranium mines of Jadugoda, Jharkhand. His was a life shaped by the ideals of industrial India—the “temples of modern India”— where one could hope to build a secure livelihood and a better future for one’s children. But by the end of his life, those hopes had given way to the quiet despair that has touched so many workers in liberalised India. Written from the son’s perspective, the memoir opens with the shock of loss and slowly threads together fragments of memory to recount the life of his father and the larger family journey.

The book begins with the father’s return to his ancestral village after retirement, carrying the hope that he would spend the latter years of his life in the place where he was born. But the village refused to accept a man who had, in many ways, become an outsider. Petty self-interest, property disputes, family quarrels, and the relentless financial demands of relatives created a climate of alienation. The same village the father had left in his youth in search of work now offered only estrangement in his old age.