Note 37
The cover image for this release of Out of Print is by Dhruvi Acharya. Titled ‘Painting in the Time of Corona, 11 April 2020, lockdown day 18’ (watercolour on paper, 50.8 cm by 36.2 cm), it is one of an extraordinary series that she began on March 22, 2020, the day of the Janata Curfew. By that time, Dhruvi had been in self-isolation for ten days. She soon challenged herself to try and complete a painting every day of lockdown. Each of the pictures is visually compelling and profoundly thought-provoking, an intense reflection of what she is going through, what we are collectively going through. The one on the cover, with its layered complexity and multiple stories struck us as a way to look from the bizarre reality of the present time to a set of tense, strong stories written before the pandemic.
Out of Print 37 features six stories. They deal with love, loss, desire, neglect, faith, compromise, power and its misuse, caste and injustice, and disease.
Perhaps ‘Phantom Vibration Syndrome’ by Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal bears the most direct connection to the dystopic, disease-ridden reality of today. The story is set in a world struck by a pandemic that throws all perceptions of normalcy awry. In this scenario the protagonist tries to come to terms with living in India after many years of the liberation that anonymity provides, carve out her intellectual and professional life, and pursue love.
Zui Kumar-Reddy’s ‘Tyre’ has a terrifying trajectory. We enter the protagonist’s mind as she struggles with the grief and displacement and mental schisms born of loss. The devastating consequences of this pain, the random impact that her distraction and preoccupation with her internal anxieties have as she fights for balance simply cannot be anticipated. A reader enters the landscape as an innocent, a sympathetic and increasingly more engaged observer, and leaves, completely wrung.
With Vignesh Babu’s ‘Gobi Manchurian’ and Banojyotsna Lahiri’s ‘The Curse’ we examine power, control, hierarchy and injustice. Poverty, class and social vulnerability drive Vignesh Babu’s story. The narrator and main protagonist, Selvi’s tough, biting attitude turns tender when she speaks of her daughter Rani. With no illusions as to how the world functions, Selvi does everything necessary to make her daughter’s life a better one. ‘The Curse’, that traverses centuries, looks at the unchanging cruelty of caste. Set in the hot, dry interior of central India, it follows Bhoomi who has been violated and killed and trapped in a well built for and by the untouchables in her village. When she is ultimately released, it is into the middle of a dispute over water where a young mahar girl is lynched.
The remaining two stories offer a sense of hope. ‘The Year of the Kurinji’ by Vidya Ravi opens with the line, ‘Krishna has been a virgin wife for a year.’ It is the year of the kurinji, the purple flower that blooms in the hills of the Western Ghats once a decade. ’Why, wouldn’t that seal any marital union? Lord Murugan had adorned the tribal girl Valli with a garland to consummate their romance. … But, the bloom was late.’ The story evokes Draupadi and the five Pandava brothers as Krishna explores the love and lust she feels for her husband and his brothers.
‘Senthil’s Last Song’ by Praveena Shivram is about a singer who ‘could feel the music travel through his veins like heat’. But the music has halted, he can no longer sing. As the story weaves in and out of two worlds, the reader journeys with Senthil as realises that he can only retrieve his voice when he recognises who he is and where he comes from.
The art on the cover of Out of Print 37 is by Dhruvi Acharya.