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Bauney
The first story, Partapee da Partap, is about the beautiful (Partapee) wife of a Dalit in the village, whose husband, being in defence services, remains away from home. She has to protect herself from the prying eyes of upper caste men and even the sexual advances of her own brothers-in-law. After the death of her mother, Partapee, as a young girl, had to save herself at her parent’s house, too. Her father had then begged her to uphold his honour in the village. Similarly, her husband also extracted from her a vow to keep herself untouched in his absence. The climax comes when Partapee rebukes her younger son, an Excise and Taxation Officer, for using the surname of a prominent upper caste. The son then tears up his personal visiting cards and apologises to her mother. Akheerli Pandtani depicts the anger of a Dalit’s child who had seen the sexual exploitation of his mother while she was working as a sweeperess in the house of a Pandit in the village. The feeling of revenge keeps brewing in the kid who later becomes an IAS officer. All through different assignments as SDM and Deputy Commissioner, he ensures to deploy his personal assistant and other staff only young Pandit girls. He abuses them with vengeance, so much so that he vengefully marries an IAS girl from a Pandit’s family. In Namard (impotent) and Bauney (small statured), the lifestyle of so-called corporate executives have been portrayed as how they flaunt their riches and contacts, how politicians and bureaucrats play subsequent to them, how celebrities of the screen world, including writers and artists, dance to their tunes and accept high sounding accolades. At the same time, the author points out how a writer, the winner of numerous awards, is ignored in the melee of gala celebrations. The stories vividly bring out the drastically challenging lifestyles of the 21st century. The reader himself feels lost as to where he stands in this society. Though Bauney is a small collection, its canvass is very large.
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THIS
book is a collection
of 21 stories in Punjabi by B.S. Bir who already has to his credit
several books in Punjabi and Hindi. The headings of some of the stories
are so colloquial and satirical that even an onlooker would get curious
and itches to know the end of it. Story after story offers a similar
treat and the reader tends to read the whole book in one go. The plot,
prose and style are engaging, and the flow is so absorbing that the
reader perceives the situations in the story as real-life happenings.