<DIV></DIV> <div> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Unlike most of Mahasweta Devi's works, which focus on Bengali tribes and the rural dispossessed, the four stories collected in <I>Bait </I>are located in the urban and suburban criminal underworld, and form an unusual segment of Devi's oeuvre.</p> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0.5in">The first story, “Fisherman,” is about a man who recovers the bodies of young boys from the village pond so that the police can pass them off as victims of drowning. “Knife,” on the other hand, is a tongue-in-cheek account of the liminal cultural world of West Bengal, which borders Bangladesh. A young woman makes her own protest against an exploitative establishment as a result of abuse by a politician and his cohorts in “Body.” An unemployed middle-class youth discovers himself after his first “test” killing in the dark story “Killer.”</p> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0.5in">This collection of fascinating and unsettling stories is anchored by an in-depth introductory essay by cultural historian Sumanta Banerjee who has firsthand familiarity with the settings and situations from his crime-reporting past. Banerjee contextualizes the stories within the development of the growing criminal underworld in Bengal today.</P></DIV>