‘The Dead Fish’: In Hindi writer Rajkamal Choudhary’s novel, desire festers in a dark city

What does desire smell like? For the poets of Kolkata, it may once have smelled of bela flowers, devotion or a monsoon-soaked afternoon. But for those who have slipped past the edge of yearning, the smell suffocates. Rajkamal Choudhary’s Machhli Mari Hui – now resurrected as The Dead Fish through Mahua Sen’s translation – strips the romanticism of both the city and the body, offering a version of desire that has long festered and is rank with decay. The Dead Fish follows its protagonist, Nirmal Padmavat, through his failures and futile attempts at giving and receiving love, foregrounded against a dark Kolkata that has no tenderness to offer. Nirmal isn’t the sole dark figure against a glittering city, but emblematic of the cityscape populated by figures that are as alone, pained and yet hoping for tenderness. As he moves from sullen beds to stagnant corporate offices, the reader, too, suffocates.

Yet, this suffocation is much more than an artistic choice. The Kolkata of the novel has no ambling trams, no sepia-tinged yellow taxis, no poetry or literature. But this is the Kolkata that remains once Choudhary tears away at the plush layers of nostalgia. The skeleton of the city is revealed: of profit, capital and bodies reduced to economic units, where tenderness is a neglected luxury. Today, as Kolkata’s nostalgia for herself fails to save her from decay, Choudhary’s novel makes the memoryscape rot, forcing us to smell the truth beneath the rosewater.

Desire as capital

The novel orbits four characters – Nirmal, his deceased former lover Kalyani, Kalyani’s daughter Priya, and Nirmal’s wife Shirin. The characters move against each other, tangled up in each other’s nets of longing and injury; they fall in and out of love, wounding and craving each other. Kalyani’s abhorrence of Nirmal stems from his inability to perform sexually, something that Nirmal carries with him throughout his adulthood, ultimately constructing the loftiest tower in Kolkata, named Kalyani Mansion. In this materialised phallic fantasy of thirty floors, he lives alone, visited only by the spectre of Kalyani. In imagistic spurs, Shirin and Priya both morph into Kalyani, laughing cacophonously at Nirmal’s failure. Their relationships are collisions, marked by ruptures, betrayals and desperate returns.

Among the most striking choices Choudhary makes is his explicit depiction of lesbian desire between Kalyani and Shirin – a bold gesture for the novel’s time and place. But refreshingly, it never reads as tokenistic; Choudhary allows their intimacy its room to breathe and unfold with its own texture and urgency, even if only for a few chapters.

The novel finds its sharpest edge through Choudhary’s refusal of the easy refuge of psychology: Nirmal is not redeemed through his childhood trauma; Kalyani is not softened through maternal tenderness; Shirin is not sanctified through victimhood. Instead, they remain damaged, unheroic, and frighteningly human. Their desires corrode them from within, and yet they return to desire with an almost religious devotion.

In The Dead Fish, longing extends far beyond the corporeal; it attaches itself to the possession of wealth, to social standing, to the fantasy of moral superiority. Sexuality seeps into every crevice of ambition and aspirations – bodies, property, land and mills are equally ownable. Sex is ultimately indistinguishable from the transaction of bodies and land.

Sexuality through tenderness and terror

Shirin emerges as the most arresting figure, suspended in the air that doesn’t allow her to breathe. Her love for women, especially her tentative, trembling affection for Priya, is one of the softest dynamics the novel offers the reader. Her sexuality isn’t a rebellion against heteropatriarchal structures, but clandestine, reserved and domestic, and a necessity, bringing to mind Deepa Mehta’s Fire. Shirin’s earliest experience of intimacy is shaped by an incestuous yet startlingly gentle relationship with her sister; Choudhary writes this without sensationalism, allowing it to appear as the only tenderness available in a violent world.

The death of her mother in childbirth is the axis around which Shirin’s desire turns. Terrified by the risks that heterosexuality demands from women, the sex that can kill, the womb that can rupture, she turns away from men, not from ideology, but from terror. Her sexuality grows out of her body’s memory of pain, shaped by the fear of pregnancy. Sexuality and terror are perhaps the strongest conjugal pair in the novel, far more intertwined than any of the characters can allow themselves to be. Yet Choudhary writes this not with voyeuristic spectacle but with startling tenderness. It is in Shirin’s persistence, rather than Nirmal’s theatrical suffering, that the novel becomes luminous.

Mahua Sen’s translation, despite having a pulse that cannot be dismissed, occasionally falters at certain points where the novel might have breathed quietly. At moments of emotional complexity, the English resorts to clinical labels; Nirmal is said to suffer from an “inferiority complex,” a touch too literal for a character built on ambiguity and fracture. One wishes, sometimes, for more space to sit with the darkness, feeling it before having it named. Yet, Sen’s translation does a brilliant job of capturing the relentless pacing of the novel, leaving the reader short of breath. The prose can be richly imagistic, saturated with sensory detail that feels almost tactile. At its best, it invites the reader to breathe in the humidity of its rooms and linger in the damp air.

The Dead Fish, Rajkamal Choudhary, translated from the Hindi by Mahua Sen, Rupa Publications.