There are few things as mysterious as the idea of Fate. In his collection of short stories, The Line Reader, Agni Tripathi appears to pay tribute to this idea. The stories are steeped in irony and present characters from different walks of life and their unique relationship with fate— we have those who try to predict it, those who could have prevented it, and those who couldn’t. They bring us a series of ‘what if ’s and ‘if only’s. The stories bring forth the idea of unpredictability by introducing unexpected endings. Where this device works, the effect is often chilling. I particularly enjoyed ‘Killing’, a conversation between police officers investigating a serial killer. However, the flaw with this device is that one comes to expect the ‘twist endings’ and they grow tiresome as one gets through the collection. An example of this is ‘The Meeting’, a tale of one person’s reaction to a phone call informing him of the death of a relative.
November 2016, volume 40, No 11