HaJaBaRaLa or HJBRL: A Nonsense Story is a novella or novelette by Sukumar Ray

Sukumar Ray

Sukumar Ray , , was a Bengali humorous poet, story writer and playwright who mainly wrote for children. As perhaps the most famous Indian practitioner of literary nonsense, he is often compared to Lewis Carroll...

.

This story belongs to the nonsense

Nonsense

Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system, that lacks any coherent meaning. Sometimes in ordinary usage, nonsense is synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous...

 genre, as does most of Sukumar Ray's fiction. There is a similarity to Alice In Wonderland in plot organisation and the ending, though these characteristics could be said to be common to most nonsense stories.

Plot

The story starts with a boy suddenly waking up from sleep and finding that the handkerchief he placed just beside him before sleeping has turned into a cat. He starts talking to the cat, who speaks nonsensically about a handkerchief and a semicolon before disappearing over the hedge. He tells him to go find Kakeshwar, in a series of calculations that eventually tell him that he is in a tree. The boy finds Kakeshwar doing calculations in a slate and doing some mathematics that appears very unusual to the boy. This includes division that is purely illogical and fallacious. After arguing over math, a goat appears and narrates his life about eating paper and other artificial things. Hijibijbij appears and laughs after denouncing three names for all his family at three inquiries. Then many animals appear, and confusion results. The boy wakes up from his odd dream and finds the cat, which does not talk.

Characters

Most of the characters have found idiomatic usage in Bengali

Bengali language

Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...

 language, which is true for many of Ray's works.

Some of the main characters are:

Kakkeshwar kuchkuche (Bangla: কাক্কেশ্বর কুচকুচে): A raven who wears a clerk's green eyeshade

Green eyeshade

Green eyeshades are a type of visor that were worn most often from the late 19th century to the middle 20th century by accountants, telegraphers, copy editors and others engaged in vision-intensive, detail-oriented occupations in order to lessen eyestrain and other effects of early incandescent...

while performing mathematics.

Gechodada (Bangla: গেছোদাদা): A character that is only alluded to by the cat but never appears in the story. he is completely unpredictable, and according to the cat, can only be found solving a very complicated, irrational and nonsensical mathematics, which depends on many probabilities about where Gechodada can be that moment.

Hijibijbij (Bangla:হিজিবিজবিজ):A person who imagines very improbable situations and laughs at them.

Byakaran Shing BA Khadyabisharad (Bangla:ব্যাকরণ শিং বি,এ,খাদ্যবিশারদ):A goat who delivers academic lectures on non-academic subjects, such as what goats do not eat.

Udhho and Budhho (Bangla: উধো আর বুধো): dwarf-like creatures who are fighting one moment and hugging the next. The phrase "Udhor pindi Budhor ghare", meaning (but not literally translated to) "the shoe is on the other foot", has become a very common idiom.

There are many other characters.

External links

Transcript of হযবরল in Bengali