her, she cries silently. The beauty of Amarkant's writing lies in its simplicity, which the critic Pranaya Krishna described as “the most difficult pursuit”. Amarkant goes deep into the sociology as well as the psychology of his characters without any cathartic drama and turns them into authentic representatives of our social margins. Urban brutalities His short stories of the later period mark a shift to urban brutalities. In Hatyaare, he describes two young bullies who boast to each other about being close to leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and John F. Kennedy, about refusing the offer of the Prime Minister's post, and about being Presidents. They sexually exploit a poor woman, deprive her of her wages and, while running away, knife to death a man chasing them. It is a dark and cruel world profiled in a tense, mocking language. During a drinking bout, one of the bullies says: “Wretch! You're a coward! I was thinking that when I become Prime Minister, I'd make you the President of the Society for the Prevention of Corruption and the Society for the Abolition of Casteism. But if you can't drink this much, then how are you going to take bribes from officials? How will you make forgeries? How will you tell lies? How then are you going to serve the country, scum?” Amarkant's own life has been full of struggles. At a time when a journalist's job was not a lucrative one, he worked most of his life in that profession with various newspapers, literary periodicals, and news magazines published by Mitra Prakashan in Allahabad. Born in Balia on 1 July 1925, he was, as a 17-year-old student, attracted to the Quit India movement headed by stalwarts such as Acharya Narendra Dev, Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan. Gandhiji's “Do or Die” call had a historic impact on Balia, along with Satara in Maharashtra and Medinipur in West Bengal. An independent government was formed for 10 days in Balia and non-violent revolutionaries took over police stations and tehsils and freed prisoners from the jail. Later, in 2003, this history surfaced in Amarkant's voluminous novel Inheen Hathiyaron Se (With These Weapons Alone), which focusses on the people rather than the leaders involved in the movement. One of the characters in the novel says: “Call it Gandhi storm, old dame storm or mega storm, it is a well-known storm in human history. Yes, this