“The Final Solution” is a story by Manik Bandopadhyay, who is an Indian Bengali, writing about the destruction of values and the politics of power and sexuality in the spiralling refugee problem in Calcutta, which was a direct aftermath of the 1947 Partition. Many of the Hindu families who left their homes in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and came to West Bengal in India, could not find refuge in the overcrowded camps. They were forced to settle in any place they could find, including public places like the Sealdaha Railway Station. The protagonist of the story, Mallika, resides on this railway platform: “Mallika’s family had a place, the length of a spread out mattress. Everything, everyone is squeezed in there – Mallika, her husband Bhushan, their two-and-half-year-old son Khokon and her widowed sister-in-law Asha; tin suitcases, beddings, bundles, pots and pans” (19). The very precariousness and transit-oriness of such a location foregrounds the family’s rootless and destabilised existence, and the irony of having a “mattress kingdom” is sharper in the context of the irreversible displacement suffered by them (19). When the tout, Pramatha, comes to Mallika with the offer of “some jobs still available for women”, she understands the risk, yet one look at her child, “now reduced to a skeleton”, makes her agree because, as she says, “There’s no other way out for us” (21). It is the compulsions of maternal love that prompt her to compromise her body and self-respect. As she says to her sister-in-law, Asha, “I would be ready to die if that could keep my child alive” (23). Yet she is repulsed when Pramatha makes sexual advances to her. “She had accepted the fact that Pramatha was going to engage her in prostitution, but she couldn’t tolerate the thought that he had planned to enjoy her first, before introducing her to the profession” (29). Whereas prostitution is like a humiliating, yet depersonalised and necessary act she must engage in to in the hope of a better present for her son, Pramatha’s violation of her body is like a personal betrayal of her trust in him. This act of betrayal breaks the boundaries of her patience, and she strangles him to death. The money she takes from the dead man’s pockets represents “the final solution” to her, as she says in the end, “We’ll never be hungry again…My son will have milk four times a day” (30). The act of murdering Pramatha empowers her, and she says, “What did he take me for? Am I weak just because I’m a woman?” (30). She decides henceforth to carry a knife when engaging with men, because violence has become the currency of human negotiation during Partition. From a victim, she becomes an agent of her own and her family’s destiny. Any moral guilt that she might have felt is erased by the fierce mother-love that propels her. The text is open-ended; the writer does not judge her morally or punish her legally, and even the reader is compelled to withhold judgement in the context of the sheer desperation of the plight of the refugee mother.