Just when I thought programmes based on literary works had been taken off air for good, I stumbled upon Prathom Protishruti (First Promise), a Bangla TV serial based on Ashapurna Debi’s first eponymous novel in her trilogy (followed by Subarnolata and Bakul Katha). This was one of my rare meetings with Debi – through the heroine, Satyabati. A particular scene has stayed with me – eight-year-old Satyabati is reprimanded by a widow for ‘composing rhymes’. How could a woman compose rhymes? How dare she?A week ago, I was called upon to share my experiences of working as an editor on Shake the Bottle and Other Stories, a collection of 21 stories from Debi’s oeuvre of over 3,000 stories – a privilege usually reserved for an author or a translator. As I sat down to write the piece, memories of evenings spent glued to the television screen, in the comforting presence of my mother, a decade and a half ago, came flashing past. We would fight back tears while watching Pankaj Kapur in Tehreer: Munshi Premchand ki Godaan, or stifle a giggle at Swami’s antics in R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days.In Prathom Protishruti, Satyabati’s fearlessness moved my mother, stirred me too. Despite the time and space that separated her world from mine, Satyabati didn’t seem all that anachronistic. Nor did Subarnolata, Bakul or so many other women who inhabited Debi’s fictional world. In the 21st century, not once did I feel disconnected by a chasm of unfamiliarity on reading Debi, a 20th-century writer.Ashapurna Debi Shake the Bottle and Other StoriesDebi’s literary genius was such that even though the semantics, geographical backdrop, identity of her characters and situations were all evidently localised in her perception of the ‘Bengali’ sensibility, the plethora of emotions that she captured through her stories transcended her linguistic and immediate socio-cultural contexts. This was borne out by my parallel contact with Debi’s stories in English – and the credit goes to Arunava Sinha, twice the winner of the Crossword Award for translation, who carried forward Debi’s stories to Anglophone readers.Before joining a publishing house, I had tried my hand at lifestyle journalism for a few years. I enjoyed writing book reviews and particularly liked reading and reviewing translations. In the summer of 2015, my first commissioning assignment began with a meeting with Sinha. I had already reviewed a few of his translations – Rabisankar Bal’s Dozakhnama and Soumitra Chatterjee’s Master and I. Sinha mentioned he was working, amongst other projects, on a collection of Debi’s short stories. I expressed my desire to sign him up for the project to Dipa Chaudhuri, my editor-in-chief, who loved the idea. And my publisher, Ajay Mago’s go ahead was doubly reassuring.Thus began my twin engagement with Debi and her translator Sinha. What followed was the agony and ecstasy of discovering multiple layers in each story as it turned up one after another in my mailbox.Debi’s world was her home. From within the confines of her home, she wrote about the world, and effortlessly so. As an editor, my association with Debi played out at multiple levels – as a woman, as a girl who’d had access to formal education, as a being who had been born into her cultural space, as a lover of the written word, in rhyme or in prose. On many dreary mornings and lull nights, an omnipresent Debi spoke to me intensely in both Bengali and English about myriad realities. Her stories mirrored the trials and tribulations of women and men, children and people in their sunset years – all belonging to an array of social milieus.Embroiled in run-of-the-mill conflicts, her characters were extraordinary for the way in which their minds worked. Similar characters were recast in dissimilar situations. Psychological tussles were exposed simply, and predictable climaxes shunned. As a reader, there were times when a Bangla term, retained as is, in the translation made me ponder over its possible English equivalent and at other times, I paused at a sentence wondering how it would have been strung in the original. The author’s distinctness and the translator’s instinct and discretion – how well had they actually complemented each other.As I moved from one story to the other, I began picking my favourites – while I admired the resilience of a mother seeking refuge in deception for the sake of her daughter, my heart wept for the old, lonely man who devised an ingenious way to overcome loneliness, and I felt a lump in my throat when a mother-in-law’s death-wish was realised in the most bizarre manner.An absolute gem in this collection is Debi’s autobiographical essay, which offers a thought-provoking insight into the psyche of a woman whose writing life spanned both colonial and post-colonial India. Had Debi been amongst us today, how would she have reacted to the people around her? Would she have been indulgent, contemptuous, or played up their twisted psyches?One of the many wonderful women I interacted with during this creative voyage was Nupur Gupta, Debi’s daughter-in-law, who resides at 17 Kanungo Park, the home Debi built in 1970, along with her husband Kalidas Gupta. Nupur was delighted to learn of the collection of Debi’s stories that Om Books International was to publish. Along with the signed contract that she returned, she also sent a handwritten list of already published short stories of Debi in English so that the translator’s hunt could be streamlined. Each time I spoke to the 80-year-old daughter-in-law, I willed myself into imagining Debi conversing with me. Even if I made a vague reference to an episode from a story, Nupur would not only give me the exact name of the story, she would also gently narrate a sketchy outline – such was her encyclopaedic grasp over her illustrious mother-in-law’s works.It was an editorial call to request Sharmila Tagore to write a foreword to this collection. That set me off to another world of discoveries. For one, I learnt that Tagore had an uncanny connection with Debi. If readers wish to know how and when Ray’s Debi encountered Debi, here’s a hint – it was not on the sets of a Ray movie. The other epiphany was to witness the renowned actress in the unusual role of a writer.For the cover, Arijit Ganguly, the creative head, picked out Bikash Bhattacharjee’s emblematic painting from the Durga series. Thanks to Bikash Niyogi, I was able to get in touch with a member of the estate of Bikash Bhattacharjee – Parbati Bhattacharjee, his wife, and yet another exceptional woman who stepped in at the tail end of the making of the book. I learnt much from her about the renowned painter’s Durga, Brown, Doll and Prostitute series, and about some of his prominent artworks titled Visarjan, An Unknown Bride and Durga In The Morning. The piercing gazes of his women on canvas redefined stoicism and rebellion, submission and subversion. The woman on the cover of Shake the Bottle and Other Stories, with her back to the Durga idol and facing the reader is unmistakably Ashapurna’s woman – within the frame but ready to cross the threshold.Years ago, at a literature festival, Amitav Ghosh had recounted an anecdote about eminent novelist and his dear friend, late Sunil Gangopadhyay. While releasing one of Ghosh’s novels, the latter had remarked, ‘E toh dekchhi Bangla boi, shudhu ingrijite lekha! (This is a Bengali book, just that it’s written in English!)’ While working on Shake the Bottle and Other Stories by a novelist who was a woman and who wrote in Bangla, I couldn’t help but relay Gangopadhyay’s words albeit slightly tweaked – she penned universal stories, just that these were written in Bangla.Ashapurna Debi, thank you for showing us how to expand the cocoon to engulf the universe.As far as structural, line and copy-editing go, that was par for the course.Ipshita Mitra is a senior editor with one of India’s leading publishing houses.