Snowflakes from a Summertown-Navodaya Series

Snowflakes from a Summertown: Outlined by despair, hued with dreams are the stories that host our lives. Snowflakes from a Summertown traces the wanderings of an ever-ongoing search for a place, where our stories could seek home. This book, in its meanderings, is homage to and celebration of the very art and act of making fiction that apart from lending richness, grants a certain dignity to the conditions of being human.

Sounak Das (b. 1991) lives in Kolkata. Formerly a mechanical engineer profession, he had left his career to pursue a M.A. in Comparative Literature. He is presently pursuing his Ph.D in the same field from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He has published academic papers in refereed journals centered on Athol Fugard's plays, Jibanananda Das's novels and Adwaita Malla Barman's work.

As life usually does the connection clicked into place when I was working at something totally divorced from the subject at hand, which was this book. Snowflakes from a Summertown. There are summer towns in the Southern Hemisphere where snowflakes may not prove to be totally unexpected. However this is very much a summer town in Eastern India and hence the jolt factor when it comes to it.

The poetry is in the title - it conjures up musings of snow drifting through the light veil of sunlight. A small bridge perhaps joining the twin arcs of a medieval town. There is something about the title - though there is no short story by that name in the collection - that dances the reader to Europe. The stories in this collection are filled with introspection, the musings of a poet who chooses to shield his thoughts in the armour of prose. Introspections are deep reflections of nightfall over a river and the myriad sounds that fill the consciousness of a blind woman unfortunate by name and nature. In a sense, it is about a matter of seeing that can spin kittens into philosophers and a not so beautiful woman under a krishnachura tree into a statue blessed into beauty by the sun shadows.

**Contents and Sample Pages**