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The literature of mourning is a curious subgenre. It can easily slip into sentimentality, but the best examples rise above that to reflect on bigger things, society, time, and the fragile bonds that hold families together. Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai, a memoir in Hindi by journalist and writer Jey Sushil, belongs to that rare kind. It is both a deeply personal story of a son grieving his father and a wider reflection on a disappearing way of life in postcolonial India.
This way of life was shaped by ideas of collective work, the respect tied to public sector jobs, political dreams, and simple, honest hopes. It once shaped the lives of millions in India’s industrial towns. As India shifted towards a market-driven and individualistic culture, that world began to fade not through breaking news, but in quiet living rooms and long silences. Sushil’s memoir is one of the few literary attempts in recent memory to document that quiet erosion.
The memoir, written with startling clarity and emotional restraint, revolves around Sushil’s late father, a man born in a small village in north Bihar, who spent much of his working life in the uranium mines of Jadugoda, now in Jharkhand part of the industrial belt that once symbolised India’s postcolonial ambition. His life was shaped by the hopes of Nehruvian socialism and the dignity of unionised labour, only to end in the quiet disappointment that many experienced in liberalised India. His story, rendered with care and restraint, reflects a generation of working-class men who helped build the Indian republic but were rarely written about.
In this way, Sushil’s memoir joins a quiet but significant tradition of sons writing to understand their fathers. Akhil Sharma’s Family Life explores a boy’s fraught relationship with his parents amid grief and migration; Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History traces a son’s search for an absent father across borders, ideologies, and silences. Saikat Majumdar’s The Firebird captures the delicate act of observing a parent’s gradual unravelling from a child’s eye. Even in VS Naipaul’s Miguel Street, the narrator tries to make sense of his father’s slow decline and the quiet failures of an ordinary man. Like Naipaul’s characters, Sushil’s father is ordinary; he is not a writer, leader or thinker, but through this memoir, he becomes unforgettable, a symbol of middle India’s lost dreams and fading dignity.
The inner world of grief
Sushil begins his story not with grand declarations but with an awkward phone call, a simple SMS that triggers a landslide of memory. This is refreshing. Indian memoirs often tend to adopt a heroic tone, as if the narrator had always been aware of the literary weight of his own story, scripting his life in hindsight. Sushil, in contrast, writes from the middle of confusion, from within the fog of unresolved emotions. His grief is not performative; it is searching, unadorned, and honest. It grows gradually, like a slow monsoon over parched ground and as it deepens, so too do our sympathies, not just for the storyteller, but for the father whose absence animates every page.
What opens is a moving recollection of childhood in Jadugoda, not just a place on the industrial map of India, but a dream built with brick, uranium, and belief. Sushil writes with tender clarity about his mother, his brothers, sisters-in-law, and the nephew who is now grown; later, his artist-wife and infant son quietly enter the story, threading the past with the present. Created during the zenith of India’s post-independence industrial push, Jadugoda, as Sushil reveals, was a city held together not by policy but by people – the technicians, clerks, drivers, and mine workers who believed in the republic’s promise, even when that belief asked for everything and gave very little in return.
At the heart of this fragile promise stood Sushil’s father, a unionist, a principled man, at times rigid, often misunderstood, but never cynical. He believed in the dignity of labour, read Hindi magazines like Dharmyug and Saptahik Hindustan, wrote letters with care, and took pride in his small kitchen garden.
To understand the son, we must first understand the father. Sushil, a journalist who once flirted with being an artist, carries a quiet urge to observe, record, and belong. This seems to come from his father, whose life was filled with handwritten notes, old pamphlets, union records, and minutes of political meetings.
While reading, we find that Sushil’s prose is gentler, more intimate. He writes less like a polemicist and more like a witness to both public change and private loss. His grief is not tidy or stylised; it meanders, returning to the domestic; the memory of onions growing by the kitchen, a half-read Dharmyug magazine, the sound of a transistor crackling in the summer heat.
In these moments, Sushil achieves what few writers do; he brings together the sentimental and the structural, capturing both a father’s silence and a generation’s fading script.
The place and the migration
One of the memoir’s greatest strengths is its deep-rootedness in place. Jadugoda, Darbhanga, and the small towns of eastern India are not mere settings, they are living, breathing characters. Sushil describes these spaces with a gaze that is clear-eyed yet affectionate. He includes the emotional geography of small-town life, where distances are not measured in kilometres but in rituals, reputations, and shared memories.
Migration, in Sushil’s telling, is a quiet, cyclical process of leaving, returning, and never fully belonging again. His father’s move from the ancestral village to the industrial township of Jadugoda, and Sushil’s own journey from Jharkhand to Delhi and eventually to the United States, are narrated not as escapes or achievements, but as part of a slow dislocation. The further he moves from home, the more he clings to memory. In this way, the memoir is not only an elegy for a father or a time, but also for the fragile threads that tie us to where we come from, even when we can no longer return.
Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai is not a conventional memoir. It does not have a linear plot, nor does it offer easy closure. What it does provide, however, is a rare honesty. It speaks of disappointment, of misunderstanding, of silences that accumulate over the years.
As a reader’s questions may arise in our thoughts, like, What do we owe our parents? Or, what parts of their stories do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind?
Sushil does not offer definitive answers, but rather invites us to sit with these questions, in the long shadow of memory, in the in-between spaces of love and regret. In its quiet, unassuming way, this memoir becomes a gentle act of remembrance, and perhaps, of reconciliation.
In an age obsessed with spectacle, where public memory is curated through soundbites and hashtags, Sushil’s memoir is an act of quiet resistance. It reminds us that grief is not a performance; it is a conversation, often with people who are no longer there to respond.
If literature has a civic role, it is to recover these lost conversations. In doing so, it helps build a more honest archive of the nation’s inner life. Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai does precisely that and with grace, depth, and lasting dignity.
Ashutosh Kumar Thakur curates the Benaras Literature Festival.
Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar, Jey Sushil, Rukh Publication.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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