The city’s landscape changes before our eyes. There are tanks on the roads, blockades everywhere, and soon, our narrator is given a machine gun to hold by a kindly neighbour, which is obviously not appreciated by her mother. The narrator, her mother and brother watch Molotov cocktails being flung about on the streets and classrooms are now slowly getting bereft of classmates.
When Akran learns that the kidnapped girls–yes, multiple girls–are being used as part of a ritual to bring back a great evil into the world, he has very little time to stop it from happening and yet he must try his best, because the powerful person on the other side has kidnapped Shukra and is using him for nefarious means.
There are a few lines and phrases that especially stood out to me: the idea of setting up a momo stand— ‘Yes! That is something that is quite popular right now and which corporate slave hasn’t wondered the same while having street food? I wonder if I would be happier and better off owning a street stall rather than working a nine-to-five, LOL’
Muskaan has been working for over two decades with poor and marginalized communities of Bhopal. Gaanth brings together the narratives of three women who were little girls during the riots of 1992, which took place after the destruction of Babri Masjid. The stories are based on the authors’
Written by young writers, the stories are full of keen observations and lively details. We see the world through their eyes, endowing it with familiarity, attentiveness, compassion and often humour. The book doesn’t follow a main singular narrative. Instead, each story opens a door into the past, present and future that lives on in the oral accounts of the people of Khichdipur. Under the shadow of the monstrous landfill, we are introduced to the worlds existing in Khichdipur’s blocks—Dhobighat, Dairy Farm, Murga Mandi, Bangali Basti, and Indra Camp, etc.
A bustling urban basti greets on the first page. Intricately detailed roofs and fixtures, water tanks and antennas, herons perched on the pillars, the mosque top with loudspeakers and orange flying festoons leave one transfixed…