Killer: Four Stories (Paperback)  | Released: 01 May 2003

Unlike most of her works, which focus on tribals and therural dispossessed, the four stories in Bait are located in the urbanand suburban underworld, and form an unusual segment of Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre-Fisherman (about Jagat who recovers bodies of young boys from the village tankso that the police can pass them off as cases of drowning), Knife (atongue-in-check account of gang warfare in a suburban town of West Bengal,bordering Bangladesh), Body (about a 'young woman', used by a politician andhis cohorts until she makes her own protest against the exploitative Establishment)and Killer (in which Sona alias Akhil, an unemployed middle-class youth,discovers himself after his first 'test' killing). The in-depth introductory essayby veteran cultural historian Sumantha Banerjee, who himself , from his crimereporting past, has a first hand familiarity with the milieu beingdepicted, puts the stories in context and goes on to discuss the development ofthe new criminal underworld in Bengal today.