What begins as an imagined scene — a character stepping into a space and making a choice — is how author, journalist Sucheta Dasgupta has built her stories for over two decades. Now, those moments of imagination come together in Ladies’ Night, a collection that moves effortlessly between the surreal and the deeply human.
Published by Running Head Books, the book brings together eighteen stories that blur genres — from magic realism and fantasy to feminist parables and speculative fiction — all anchored in voices that are bold, curious and unapologetically original.
At its heart is a barroom of stories, where women gather, drinks flow, and narratives unfold in unexpected ways — each tale offering a glimpse into lives that are strange, intimate, and strikingly relatable.
Fridaywall Magazine presents an exclusive extract from Ladies’ Night — a glimpse into a world where the bizarre feels ordinary, and every story comes with a question: which one is yours?
In this evocative passage from Ladies’ Night, memory, desire and imagination flow together, capturing the fragile intensity of growing up and falling in love. And it is a glimpse into the writing style of the author which is absolutely captivating.
Derozio
Let’s do like something real wild,’ I say to my sister. ‘Like smuggle a sholmaachh out of Baba’s shopping bag and keep it in the overflow tank,’ she suggests. So we do it. And find a name for the pet. Derozio.
It is the rainy season. We are rather proud of our seasons, really, they are different from those in the city: stronger in their flavours, more intense. It doesn’t rain like Kolkatans’ spittle on the pavement in the suburbs, when it rains here, it pours. And makes the blue morning glory bloom around the electricity pole, so overhung with creepers that it once short-circuited on itself, and the waters rise in the courtyard.
My sister prefers the water to the winds. I am the opposite. Nor’easters are my favourite. Lately, though, the rains have been growing on me. And the tank is full and Derozio is happy and we are home.
Time flies. The last term of college arrives and I promptly fall in love for the first time in my life with the most gorgeous boy in class. Well, he isn’t exactly the most gorgeous, or even, exactly, gorgeous, and there are many who know him who would be surprised at such a definition of him, but he is a smart, hard, living-on-the-edge type, and certainly the type that attracts me. He has this pair of the most awesome, transparent eyes, eyes that you can brace against, that can tumble into yours and make you quite mad, that can stop your heart, or make it overflow and flip over sideways, depending (my friend says they are like lotuses; I prefer to think they are like the autumnal shiuliphool), and a gorgeous, gorgeous smile that is the colour of my first memories of sunlight. He is small, slightly built, slightly younger, and has a slightly infamous reputation that keeps other small-town girls and the studious ones away – he doesn’t care for girls and “romance” and the works, anyway. He is a brilliant mathematician (a subject in which I am pretty good myself, but not naturally gifted), though he doesn’t have to work hard at it at all and all that (just like me there again), a cricketer (a game I had once been in love with but never got around to actually playing), and does drugs. And makes me dream beautiful dreams.
He makes me dream of big, golden lions with eyes that speak, that enter my house through the windows and park themselves about the furniture; he makes me dream of ruins of forgotten castles with rickety stairways in the middle of tall, green, endless grass that waves in black starlight, grasslands named after the town he hails from, where he lives with his autocratic father and semi-autocratic mother and is the king of the castle who rides about the house on an incongruously old black bicycle, which I get to borrow from his parents to go in search of him; he makes me dream of a magic, mythical bird with feathers the colour of a rainbow plus a kaleidoscope that sets the heavens afire, the colours beckon to me while I am in the garden, but I do not realize and go in to put the milk in the refrigerator and then I know and that very moment, I know, too, that the colours are receding and I run out and predictably, the sky is empty, and I still keep running out through the gates and on the street, barefoot, and then, just as I realize that I can go no further, incompletely attired as I am, there they reappear over the field across the main road at the end of the street, between the trees where the sun sets in the evenings, for one final goodbye. Well, he makes me dream of all this and think and feel a great deal more, and after the most exquisitely restless month I have ever spent in all my life, I give in and am revealed to. Yes, love is real.
Well, once I know it all, I have to tell him all, of course, if not anybody else and if not for a relationship that I am too scared to hope for, for academic reasons. Because I owe him at least that in thanksgiving. Perhaps more.
(Excerpted with permission from Sucheta Dasgupta’s Ladies’ Night: Stories, Running Head Books, 2026, Rs 499)
https://www.amazon.in/-/hi/Ladies-Night-Stories-Sucheta-Dasgupta/dp/8199512547
