About the Book

A DEVASTATING CHILDHOOD MEMOIR FROM ONE OF BENGAL'S LEADING DALIT WRITER AND PUBLISHER.
A village barber’s son who migrated with his family from erstwhile East Pakistan to India in 1967 revisits his childhood in the lost land. When his father set up a hair salon in the local weekly market near their new home, it fell to the little boy to seek out customers and bring them to the shop for a haircut or a shave.
But the father was keenly aware that only an education could offer his boy a way out of the penury that had been their lot. Disappointed in his older sons who had both dropped out of school, he now pinned all his hopes on the youngest son. But school was brutal on the young boy who was always shown his ‘place’, the last bench, where he sat alone, with his cracked slate and a wet rag to wipe it clean.
His only refuge was his ailing mother, with whom he sometimes forayed into the woods and up to the outskirts of the village. They saw the world through each other’s eyes. And after her passing, he found another constant companion: Bhombol, the dog that followed him like a shadow.
The Last Bench is a poignant childhood memoir about what it means to be invisible in an unequal society, about the exchanges between man and nature, and most of all, what it means to lose those whose absence changes everything.

About the Author

Adhir Biswas was born in 1955 in the village of Magura, in the Jessore district of erstwhile East Pakistan. His family moved to Calcutta in 1967. He began writing in magazines in 1976 at a friend’s prompting, and is the author of twenty-two volumes of fiction and non-fiction, including two sets of refugee memoirs, and two childhood memoirs. He was awarded the West Bengal Bangla Academy’s Suprabha Majumdar Memorial Prize in 2014 for his refugee memoir, Allahr Jomite Paa, and the Vidyasagar Prize in 2017 for his four-volume collection of stories, novellas and novels for young readers, Udojahaj. Adhir Biswas established the publishing house Gangchil in 2005. He is currently the publications editor of the Dalit Sahitya Academy in West Bengal.

About the Translator

V. Ramaswamy is a translator of voices from the margins. Among the writers he has translated from West Bengal and Bangladesh are Subimal Misra, Manoranjan Byapari, Mashiul Alam, Shahidul Zahir, Swati Guha, Shahaduz Zaman and Ismail Darbesh. His translation of Adhir Biswas’s refugee memoir, Memories of Arrival: A Voice from the Margins, was published in 2022. The Last Bench was selected for the inaugural PEN Presents award in 2022.