Tag Archives: Fiction

‘In 2018, at a meeting in Meerut in the northern State of Uttar Pradesh, the chief of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Mohan Bhagwat addressed one of the largest conclaves of RSS workers on a crisp February morning. In his long address to more than a thousand people, he said, “In India, one may follow a different eating habit, way of worshipping gods, philosophy, language and culture.

He has travelled widely, cavorted with celebrities, vacationed frequently and consumed copious quantities of vodka. The text makes little attempt to temper this presentation, leaning into the spectacle of a life lived large. But it unfortunately becomes the most glaring issue in the book—the repetitive references to luxurious hotels and expensive food and brands. It is tiring and begins to feel shallow rather quickly. In ‘An Accident Foretold: Goa’, their hotel’s name—Taj Holiday Village—is cited so frequently that it begins to feel less like a setting and more like a refrain.

India are used by the author to periodically punctuate the text and convey Halide’s impressions in her own words. In fact, the title itself borrows from Halide’s description of her feelings for India. On the other hand are the three girls: Zoya, making her way from doodling to creating ‘national’ art, Nuran, scholarly and contemplating marriage, and Aisha, who sees herself as a ‘modern’ woman aiming to become a lawyer.

While Sister Agatha is a forceful, pragmatic personality, whose ‘outsider’ tag becomes useful, especially in getting access to certain spaces, where her ‘foreigner’ tag and skin colour open doors that may be closed to ordinary Indians. Avtar is the essential counterpoint to Agatha. He is rooted in the history and complexity of Old Delhi, and his own personal experience with displacement allows him to empathize with the missing Pakistani pilgrim. Together this unlikely duo of detective and assistant get caught up in non-stop adventure, starting with a robbery they witness just outside the hotel,

Iyengar’s women, in particular, stand out. They refuse to remain confined by the roles assigned to them; they are flawed, capable, contradictory, vulnerable, and intensely alive. Though their lives are shaped by limits and pressure, their choices—often brave,

The why of the crime becomes more important. However, these sections often err on the side of over-articulation. Motivations are explained and justified at length. In seeking to make the psychology legible, the narrative occasionally flattens it. The repetition of grievance, resentment and self-pity risks turning complexity into monotony.

her 14-year-old brother who has just entered the ‘Pew Burty Club’, has a bigger share of questions without answers than her even though he is older. Their Ma is a far cry from a typical mother; she tells her children that she picked them from a shop when she was in the mood and had to keep them as the shop didn’t have a return policy. She forgets basic household chores on many days,

Where the novel shines is in Oleksiy’s fraught relationship with his childhood friend-turned-enemy Ruslan. Their history is marred by betrayal yet punctuated by unexpected loyalty. It adds genuine complexity, exploring how masculinity, loyalty and moral choice are entangled within systems of power.

The novel is driven by its varied and eclectic characters—from the idealistic Nirupama, bound in her Left ideology, to Imogen, the young English lady, and Kedar, the art lover, to Gopal—the street-smart pickpocket turned gangster. Their lives, as different as they are, intertwine with others at the hotel—Jeremy Lambert, working on war intelligence, the French chef Paul Bonnemaison, and others who frequent the titular hotel, including sex workers. This wide variety of characters ends up creating a dynamic interplay between personal ambitions, history and memory. Their lives are framed by a first-person narrator, the son of Nirupama,

Thematically, No Place to Call My Own is a palimpsest of pressing concerns—gender, religion, and the precariousness of artistic ambition in a mercurial world. Gufran situates Sophia’s personal travails against the backdrop of seismic socio-political upheavals: the #MeToo movement, the Citizenship Amendment Act protests, and the global pandemic. These events are not mere historical markers but active agents that exacerbate Sophia’s sense of unbelonging.

All three works share a concern with moral ambiguity. Their characters are not heroes or villains, but flawed individuals navigating a world where ethical clarity is a luxury. Whether it is the grieving artist in The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, the conflicted investigators in Affairs of Deception, or the scheming insiders of Party to a Crime, the protagonists are all bound by the consequences of choices they can neither fully justify nor entirely regret.

The novel is narrated by seventeen characters, with the notable exception of Burhan, the voiceless victim, with several narrating multiple chapters; over thirty-three unnumbered ones, being opened and closed by Nabeesumma and Reyhana in that order. Nabeesumma, who is a character as important as Reyhana,

Inquilab’s narrative privileges the political movement led by Gandhi and the Congress, and evades the vast complexities of social and political turmoil that India experienced. One only has to look at similar other contemporary literary work—particularly the writings by Munshi Premchand such as Seva Sadan, Rangbhoomi,

Today, that same Majnu Ka Tila, now ‘MKT’ to Gen Z, features in Ankush Saikia’s ‘Chang Town’, where Northeastern students navigate racism, longing, and identity in the capital’s northern campuses. The two stories could not be more different in form or sentiment, yet together they trace a micro-history of urban transformation: a city seen through the same coordinates, altered by time. There are many such resonances across the book. Jalil’s Introduction wisely sets them up. Stories in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, English and Malayalam reflect Delhi’s many avatars—as imperial capital, partition city, bureaucratic core, queer subculture, site of migration and protest.

The domestic world Bulbul inhabits is also one of fractured solidarities. The household is run by the formidable matriarch, Dadu, and supported by Kona Das, a Dalit Hindu woman. Their presence gestures towards the overlapping hierarchies of gender, caste and religion within a supposedly homogenous Muslim household.

A book subtitled ‘Remarkable Short Fiction’ will surely include the great storytellers: Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, Kuvempu, RK Narayan, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti, Mahasweta Devi, Vijaydan Detha, Ajeet Cour, Damodar Mauzo, Paul Zacharia and Bama, among others.

Firefly Games captures the various facets of Bengali culture, both in erstwhile Calcutta and of Bengalis in exile in the heart of India in the States of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. The intricacies of growing up, friendships and heartbreaks, corruption in government offices, relations between parents and their off-spring—Chakraborty touches on these themes and more.

But a complex formal puzzle is announced in the Author’s Note: ‘The chapters in this book are marked with a number and an alphabet. The alphabet marks its own absence in the chapter whereas the number is a more conventional ordering. And in embarking on this book, you are invited to follow either the numbers or alphabets and you will stilll be reading the same book…’

The most common thread in this collection is of the highly suspicious nature of men regarding their wives or girlfriends, of whom they are never sure, sometimes rightfully, many times because of their lack of confidence in their own attractiveness. ‘Yet Again’, ‘Chance’ and ‘God’s Good Man’ are three such illustrative stories. Destroying domestic harmony, fragile male ego plays havoc in couples’ relationships. ‘You have poison in your gaze,’ (p. 17) aptly summarizes Leena, the wife in ‘Yet Again’.

It is daunting to tell a multilayered story through the thinly disguised characters drawn from a middle-class family headed by an avowed patriarch of his time, Ram Mohan, who is essentially a man of consequence. In the mid-seventies, India was rocked by issues such as popular unrest in Gujarat, the JP Movement, the imposition of Emergency, the defeat of Indira Gandhi, Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the spurt in caste policies and the emergence of Kanshi Ram, and the bloodstained agitation for reservation. They created an air of unease, desperation, moral outrage and reprobation.