Santosh Bakaya’s Morning Meanderings take us barefoot, wistful and eager to take in her stories of unprecedented places. Review by Lopa Banerjee.
Morning Meanderings
Author: Santosh Bakaya Publisher:Blue Pencil, India Format: Kindle eBook
Santosh Bakaya is an author and poet whom I not only enjoy reading for the Dickensian poignancy, classicism, literary flavor and unique sensibility that is reflected in her work, but also considering the fact that she has been a great writing mentor, co-editor ( of the four anthologies we have brought out) and a precious confidante in my entire literary journey.
When her recent collection of splendid personal essays, ‘Morning Meanderings’ came out recently in Amazon Kindle, I couldn’t resist myself from getting it in the first week of its worldwide release. These delightful and wondrous narratives of everyday life, reflected through the author’s fine visionary pen, opens up floodgates of emotions in our minds as we delve into various mundane, surreal truths that surround us in our everyday lives, being her partners in these revelations, albeit unknowingly, one slice at a time.
The author’s note itself carries the magical potency of her language that will transport you to a beautiful realm of self-discovery. True to Khalil Gibran’s words, ‘’Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair’’, her meanderings take us barefoot, wistful and eager to take in her stories of unprecedented places, tearing apart the ordinary and mundane into a rich, poetic world of an extraordinary range of human feelings.
Having read many of these brilliantly crafted personal essays/stories published serially in Learning & Creativity e-zine, I can truly say this compilation is a value addition to the literary world in every sense and I look forward to reading all the 87 chapters of this collection with an insatiable appetite for the ‘lingering aroma’ and the ‘handful of joy’ embedded in them.
Lopamudra Banerjee is an acclaimed author, poet, translator, editor with nine solo books and six anthologies in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She has received the Journey Awards (First Place category winner) for her memoir Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey, the International Reuel Prize for Translation (2016) and also International Reuel Prize for Poetry (2017) and other honors. Her poetry has been published in renowned platforms including Life in Quarantine, the Digital Humanities Archive of Stanford University. Her collaborative poetry collection with Priscilla Rice titled We Are What We Are (Black Eagle Books, 2022) has been 1st Prize Winner at New York Book Festival 2024 and her translation of a famous Bengali historical/biographical novel titled The Bard and His Sister-in-Law (Black Eagle Books, 2023) has received Honorary Mention at Paris Book Festival and Hollywood Book Festival 2024. Recently, her debut Bengali collection of poetry Draupadi Theke Nijoswi—Amra has been launched in Kolkata and also in the Dallas Public Library, Texas, with a performance of a psychological drama ‘Mukhomukhi’, in which she has made her foray as a playwright.
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