How it began...

Parimal Bhattacharya

 In May 2025, four months after my 648-page doorstopper of a novel Satgaoner Haoatantira had been published, I received a WhatsApp message from Argha Manna, my artist friend. It was a photograph of my new book blocking the view of what appeared to be an airport lounge. Below it Argha had written—

‘What have you done, Parimalda! This is MY story!!’

He was flying to the USA to join Notre Dame University as a fellow, and was reading the novel during the long 18-hour flight. Halfway through the book, he was messaging me from a layover at Doha airport. 

‘I have a PLAN, Parimalda! Let’s talk! Will call you soon!’

Ah, plan. Earlier, Argha and I had planned to turn my Bells of Shangrila into a graphic novel. I wrote a script and he did a few brilliant sketches. A big publishing house also showed some interest. But then we got busy with our own separate projects—me writing books, Argha immersing himself in a number of international assignments. We had moved on. 

But we had thoroughly enjoyed the planning, ideating, doodling, to-and-fro-ing... 

Separated in age by two decades, Argha and I share a rare creative bond that has survived the distance between our locations, Covid, and winds of change in our personal lives. We regularly exchange ideas, information, news of the art and literary world, and feed on each other’s imaginations. So, I immediately warmed up when Argha said ‘PLAN’, although I had a suspicion that this too might end up in our mutual bucket list. 

But this time he was earnest. And after months of telephone calls, WA messages and emails exchanged across states and continents, Argha came from Gandhinagar to visit the land of Satgaon, in December, and made my empty ancestral house in Bhatpara his base. For four days, we toured the places that appear, and have given birth to, my novel. We hammered together Argha’s ‘plan’ for a multimedia installation—a visual artist’s creative response to a writer’s imagined landscape. 

After four days of travelling, cooking, eating, sketching and having long conversations in an empty house, Argha finally said—

‘But Parimalda, this project requires more than a one-off installation exhibition. The materials we have in our hands, in our minds, in our visions, deserve a museum!’

‘A museum!’ I said. ‘Inspired by a muse?’

‘Exactly!’ he said.

I know that a museum is more than a building housing old, dusty artefacts. A museum can have material objects or a digital archive; it can have both, or none, or more. In Prague, I have visited the Museum of Communism, while the old Jewish neighbourhood in the city is a living museum of Kafka’s mind—just as the old neighbourhoods in Bhatpara and Hooghly are the museums of decay, longing, and lost memories. 

The Mistweavers is the name of the Engish avatar of my Bengali novel, Satgaoner Haoatantira, which will be published next year. The Mistweavers’ Museum is a creative response to that book, that land and the history which inspired that book. It is an evolving project where we are collaborating with friends, whose interests and specializations in their own separate fields flow through, circle around or even glide past our imaginary commons. Together, we have formed the Satgaon Collective.