Note 11
There is a distinct coherence to the June 2013 release of Out of Print, a coherence that emerged as the issue came together. Most of the eight stories carry a remarkable intimacy of perspective. Characters, confronted with their own lives, examine themselves with a sometimes brutal directness, and in the process, either reconcile or not, their existence with the larger context. A sense of the personal pervades.
Two of the stories are about relationships in a marriage. In @ The Shanghai Tea House by Brinda Narayan, Sheela Rao has insisted that she accompany her husband on a trip abroad, her first, so she can keep up with her Facebook savvy cousin. We follow her and her reflections on her marriage in quiet sightseeing adventures that she, and later she and her husband determinedly embark on, which lead ultimately to a liberation in her perspectives. In Hananah Zaheer’s A Moment of Silence, Mr Dar must, after his wife’s death, confront a deeply shocking choice that she made. His sense of freedom in ‘a new fall’, from a marriage that had hung together in an unhappy, distanced and uneasy balance after their daughter took her own life is shattered, breaking through barriers of grief and emotion.
Three stories focus on young men, two on their relationships with their bodies. Mohit Parikh’s main character in Recess has discovered his first pubic hair and goes from elation that he has entered the grown up world to uncertainty and loneliness as he imagines, with trepidation, a world he does not belong to. Ultimately he must look beyond himself and his changing body to find ways to regain his equilibrium. Evoking Andre Dubus’ remarkable story of an adolescent dealing with his burgeoning sexuality in a strictly Catholic atmosphere, Kaushik Viswanath’s Karma, tells the story of young man who holds himself in rigorous check in order not to be like his father. It is a subtle and clever character study; do we like this young man, does he like himself, as he struggles with the impositions that he has enforced on himself. 11/9 by Anubha Yadav details, with a sensitive and observant eye, the story of an unhappy transplantation of a boy in tenth grade from his Delhi environment to the United States immediately following the September 11 attack. Confused, lonely, and bullied, his reaction to the terrorist event is entirely personal and has significant consequences on his life.
Evenly paced, and studied in its telling, Neeraj Sebastian’s Bangalore in Flower takes place while the characters prepare a meal for themselves. It is a conversation between friends, interwoven with the trivia of the kitchen, and explores their narratives with a clean, directness. In Suzanne Biever’s finely told, The Blue Man, a woman converses with Krishna, for whom the story is named. Convinced that she has been reincarnated, she talks to her psychiatrist about her visitations, but in the end, it is the philosophy and wisdom of ages past that guide her in living with the injustices that define the fate that is hers. Finally, in Spiderman, perhaps the least personal of the stories, Renu Balkrishnan’s protagonist encounters a bizarre gang of car thieves whose nemesis is a little boy, seemingly beatific but wild. It is not the narrator’s story, therefore more detached in the telling, and yet, even if not specifically detailed, the impact on her is deeply felt.
The Links page now includes a connection to the Out of Print database of literary magazines that feature short fiction from South Asia, as well as to a press and publicity list.
The art on the cover of Out of Print 11 is by Archana Hande.