The stories in The Grave Exhumers and Other Stories by Lutfor Rahaman were written when he was 21 years old. To be 21 and have such a deep-rooted grasp of the colour, habitation, geography, and taste of the air is remarkable to witness. And what’s more impressive is the fact that translator Mursed Alam has managed to get these details and idiosyncrasies without diluting them.Comprising six short stories, the collection zeroes down on death in some or the other form. For instance, even a seemingly optimistic story (at least by the title) called “Collectors of Hope”, starts thus: “Sohrab lost the job, finally!”A world on the marginsDeath looms over the reader like a crow perched on an ever-drying branch. Through death, Rahaman manages to construct a world on the margins, all set in a village on the outskirts of Kolkata. The stories become important because they provide a foil to the canonical Bengali literature – the Tagores and the Chattopadhyays – and take us down to the cellular level of the lives of Muslim communities in rural areas.Reading Rahaman’s world is like stepping into something new. His protagonists, who are mostly poor Muslim inhabitants, are always facing some or another obstacle. And, while you’re reading, you might think that these inhabitants would leverage some sort of morality against survival, but they don’t. Their goal is to get through the day without intellectualising their struggle. Rahaman steers clear of it as well – he refuses to let the audience pity his characters. Instead, he invites us in, piques our curiosity, and makes us embarrassed to be voyeurs.Each story also uses nature for this effect. For instance: “The sky is pitch-black. The wind cloud rinsed the soul of the whole world before thickly blanketing it. The moon is nowhere to be found. It might have died.”The characters are gritty, resilient, and religious – the last one being the driving force behind many of the decisions that they make. However, something trumps this ferventness as well – the desire to live a decent life; to separate themselves from the animals they tend. Dignity is elusive; it comes and goes and is subject to many conditions. This is illustrated by these lines: The grave or hell are all owned by those mollahs. Our hungry belly is our Allah, understood?”Lashings of natureNature and its hellish crusades are prominent themes in these stories. The rain is shown to ravage the fields, crops, and houses. Everything is tinged with greys, blacks, and blues and painted with a brush of destruction. The characters are at the mercy of an inhospitable nature; this might explain why they’re resilient – they have no other option but to be that way. This gives the stories a Sisyphian colour – it seems like one story has been reincarnated six times.The destructive side of nature is translated with economy and alignment in the author’s voice, which in turn is recreated in English by Mursed Alam. Here’s one of my favourite lines to supplement my bubbling praise: “The graveyard-night had strangled the pregnant moon a while back.”Alam’s translation brings Rahaman’s world alive and prods the reader to empathise with its protagonists, who are labourers, farmers, and daily wage earners, but without a patronising gaze.With these six stories, both the author and the translator take us on a journey across borders and beyond the usual Bengali translations that we’ve engaged with. By retaining the visual finesse of the source text, Alam manages to translate the voices on the margins that Rahaman first put in the spotlight.The Grave Exhumers and Other Stories, Lutfor Rahaman, translated from the Bengali by Mursed Alam, Yoda Press.