By Kanwar Mohinder Singh Bedi ‘Sahar’. Translated from the original Urdu by Kamna Prasad

Bedi along with some important citizens and police officials went from door to door, requesting the occupants to vacate the premises. Several members of the committee, unable to tolerate the abuses hurled at them, gave up, but Bedi with two others persisted and, in a few months, ‘almost all the residential houses were vacated’. A second incident involved someone who had fled his home in Karol Bagh during the riots and wanted to recover the valuables he had left behind. Bedi accompanied him to his house which was then occupied by a Sikh refugee. On being apprised of the matter, the Sikh immediately called his family out and told the claimant:


Reviewed by: Bodh Prakash
By Shanta Gokhale

They hurt one another too often. Not always because they are cruel but because they lack courage, are slaves of convention, or simply because they understand too late. For instance, in ‘The Quilt’, Mugdha is betrayed by her Brahmin lover, Vijay, who gives in to his caste-conscious mother and marries Avantika, the woman she has chosen. Heartbroken, Mugdha still attends their wedding reception and gifts them a handmade quilt—the one she had stitched for her own imagined wedding night with Vijay. Vijay discovers that Avantika has another man in her life. For Avantika, their marriage can simply provide a respectable cover under which both can continue with their parallel lives. A shaken Vijay returns to Mugdha, hoping to revive their relationship,


Reviewed by: Umesh Kumar
By Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge, now ninety, tells a story to Lucy Barton. What starts as a simple memory about Olive’s mother turns into a moving reflection on lost love. The story focuses on Olive’s mother, Sara, whose young romance ended because of class differences and social pressures. Years later, a discovery shows that neither lover ever truly forgot the other. The idea of ‘living with ghosts’ is also a key theme in the novel. In Strout’s work, these ghosts are memories, disappointments, missed chances and past relationships.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana
Edited and translated by Kannan M., Rebecca Whittington, D. Senthil Babu and David C. Buck

The story’s achievement lies not in its action but in its rhythm. Repeated words, ‘Ready…Ready…Ready’ and interrupted thoughts recreate the body’s own apprehension of danger. Rain accompanies the narrative with uncanny persistence. If at one moment, ‘The rain was blessing them’, elsewhere ‘the sky was looking at us with thunderclaps of laughter’. Nature is represented neither as consoling nor as condemning. Instead, it witnesses. Landscapes are not sceneries but archives in which human histories are absorbed.


Reviewed by: Anupama Nayar CV
By Tara Douglas and Jatwang Wangsa

Many of these stories shed light on the origin of prevalent social hierarchies and fraught relationships between neighbouring villages such as ‘The Migration Story of Jagan Village’. But some of these stories also offer insights into cultural practices such as that of headhunting, and the prestige and honour associated with it. It is also striking to observe that women are largely absent, occupy a secondary status or remain silent participants in these stories. ‘The Story of Yeast’ reveals how women of the Wancho tribe came to be accorded the privilege of brewing wine and how men are forbidden from even touching the ‘tonkhah’ used for the fermentation process, but any kind of privilege is undercut by the revelation that women were bestowed with this privilege so that they could have some control over men at least in an inebriated state. Another migration story, ‘The Story of Our Village and the Village in Myanmar’


Reviewed by: Shibani Phukan
By Arupa Patangia Kalita. Translated from the original Assamese by Ranjita Biswas

They occupy a liminal space with no social position. Kalita’s powerful images and metaphors convey the devastating loneliness and agony of Durgi and her son, Laba. Durgi hallucinates about women like her floating over the tea bushes with vague sounds coming from them—‘Were they singing, or weeping, or angry?’ She could neither enter the respectable Assamese society, nor her own community living in the labour lines; and stepping into matrimony with a white man was unthinkable. While her son Laba, treated like an untouchable in a North Guwahati household, enters ‘a cave of loneliness’,


Reviewed by: Jayashree Borah