Sujata’s story is framed and defined by pain.

As it opens she is asleep, her dreams

have transported her back twenty-two years, to the morning following an agonizing night
of labour and emergency surgery when she gave birth to her fourth child and second
son, Brati. Now she is awoken by searing pain once more, on the same date, January
seventeenth, but this time an inflamed appendix is to blame. Once her abdominal
distress begins to settle, a glance at the calendar takes her back to the early hours of
yet another January seventeenth, just two years earlier, when the telephone suddenly
rang. At the other end of the line, a voice summoned her to the morgue. There she
would find her beloved son reduced to a numbered corpse, 1084.

Set over the late sixties and early seventies, during the first phase of the Maoist-inspired
Naxalite insurgency in West Bengal, Mother of 1084 by Indian writer and activist,
Mahasweta Devi (1926–2016), is a focused examination of the impact of targeted
violence on those left behind through the story of one woman stranded in her loss and
grief. Sujata comes from a background of privilege, raised in a wealthy Calcutta family
and afforded an education, but in marriage her life is constrained by the roles her social
class expects of her. At the time of the critical events in this novel, she is in her early
fifties. Her oldest son and daughter, Jyoti and Neepa, are both married and each have
one child. Jyoti and his family, as custom would have it, lives in the family home. The
younger daughter, Tuli, has a serious boyfriend. Her husband, Dibyananth—or as he is
often described, “Jyoti’s father”—is a successful businessman with, once his wife
decided she wanted no more children, a string of mistresses on the side. Sujata also
has a job at a banking office, taken on her own initiative when her mother-in-law was
still alive and commanding the daily affairs of the household. It is something she has
refused to give up.

Brati, the youngest son, had always been unlike his other siblings. Imaginative and
sensitive, he was easily frightened and deeply attached to his mother. From his earliest
years on through adolescence, their bond was close while there was little love lost
between Dibyananth and his second son. Naturally Sujata was blamed for spoiling him
and making him weak. When Brati is killed with a group of young Naxalite
revolutionaries, his father’s immediate concern is to assure that no one knows of his
involvement. He pulls a few strings and Brati’s name is omitted from the news reports
while at home all evidence of his existence is cleared away and locked in his bedroom
on the uppermost floor. Sujata finds herself on the wrong side of her own family, on the
side of the dead man who had failed to consider the shame and embarrassment he
would cause. She is left alone to try to make sense of why her son had been drawn to
such a radical movement and to understand the events of the night on the eve of his
twentieth birthday that had cost him his life. It was a death that could not be classified in
any of the usual ways—illness, accident, crime:
Extending from morning to evening over the course of a single day, exactly two years
after his death, Mother of 1084 chronicles Sujata’s attempt to honour her son’s memory
and perhaps find some sense of closure. At home, Tuli is preparing to hold her
engagement party. Although it is her brother’s birth anniversary, the date has been
determined by her future mother-in-law’s American guru—her own mother’s feelings be
damned. Between attending to the necessary arrangements in the house, Sujata will
make two excursions that will help fill in some of the missing information she craves, but
not necessarily bring any peace.

In the afternoon she travels out from central Calcutta to the colony where the mother of
Somu, one of Brati’s friends, lives. The young men killed had spent their last hours in
her house. Sujata had first met Somu’s mother when she went to identify her son’s body
and she had found in this poor woman a kind of a kindred spirit, another mother who
understood the loss. But face to face with the graphic details of that fateful night and the
absolutely devastating effect it has had on this impoverished family, she is reminded
that her social status will forever be a barrier that cannot be wished away. The two
women, brought together in shock and pain at the morgue and the crematorium, share
an affinity that can never be more than temporary:

Later that afternoon, Sujata makes another outing, this one closer in location and class,
but again one with a divide that cannot be breached. For the first and last time, she
visits Brati’s girlfriend Nandini who has recently been released from prison, bearing the
injuries of torture and incarceration. In this encounter there is a bitter demonstration of
the activist’s unshakable resolve, something the grieving mother will never fully
appreciate. Upon returning home to where guests are gathered, Sujata is clearly
affected by her experiences, and all of the memories and details that have come back to
her over the course of that day. But even as pain rips through her abdomen, she must
once more attempt to play her role as wife and mother. At least for the moment.