ISSUE 40

We move into the eleventh year of Out of Print with a dozen strong stories that are reflective of past, present, and future, and of the varied and diverse characters and narratives that preoccupy us. Written before and during the pandemic, the works are a seamless bridge from the ‘before’ into this strange present we are living through where many of us construct the illusion of renormalised realities. Until the microbe presses, once again, into our consciousness – or art awakens us.

We open with Lian Dousel’s ‘Numbered Days’. It is the middle of the pandemic, the lockdown is in place, the protagonist is packed and ready to depart for home … and in this period of waiting, he thinks of what might have been – a college degree, a career, but most of all, the promise of love offered in a chance encounter. The story is written with detail and clarity that emphasise both its fatalism and sense of hope.

Four stories feature the sea – its power, its seduction, its duplicity – that manifest in the narrative even if the sea is only peripheral to the story. Praveena Shivram’s ‘The Sea Shrugged’ explores the particular hold that the sea has on those who read its whims. The old guard is being replaced, the new depends on novel fickle methods to know how the waters will behave. The story, full and rich with personality, highlights what the sea means to a fishing community that has been through the tsunami, and the bind it has on the souls of those who are tied to it. Rahul Nair’s debut work ‘One Hundred Years’ is a story of home and departure and the complex identities of belonging. Beginning with a freefall into the ocean, and the sensation of trying and not succeeding to swim up to the surface, the narrative weaves through family, place, loss, mystical beauties, love and fevered, jet-lagged dreams to departure. In ‘Homecoming’ by Sudeepta Sanyal, the protagonist has returned after many months on a cruise liner on the ocean. But coming back to land means leaving behind way of life and love. Developing the melancholy the man feels, and the weariness of spirit when he discovers that the ‘comforts of home’ are not enough to help him ‘tide over [his] grieving heart’, the narrative walks us through his world on land as we wonder what it will take him to feel alive again. Meera Ganapathi’s ‘Hair Fall’ follows a young woman whose negotiations with her world of family and domesticity are mirrored by the way her hair behaves: falling in ‘wispy clumps’ or ‘like dry leaves from an old tree’; shaped into good behaviour with a sharp comb and red ribbons; tamed into compliance and hiding true selves; curtaining her in erotic layers to be sought and revealed; forming strange tangled, knots in her womb; or in an expression of one of her inner selves, responding to the sea and blowing in wild, frenzied abandon all around her.

Strangeness and its expression are at the core of two stories – in one, entering the narrative from another world, and in the other, from within the character. In Anand Jacob’s ‘The End of the Road Trip’, we glimpse the horror we will encounter in the very first sentence, ‘The tiny creatures sensed it at once’, and feel the consequent creepiness as colonies of insects flee the unseen en masse; and we witness a jolly road trip turn into a nightmare when it enters the zone of primal local deity. Primal is also the word that describes the response of a young woman in Poornima Laxmeshwar’s ‘Nine’, the title indicating the number of miscarriages she has had. With a ‘uterus too fragile to hold a life’, and a mind that, even in the temple, bounces ‘from blood to foetuses, to death,’ her reaction is primal, fundamental when the family foists a young nephew upon her to bring up as her own.

Arathy Ashok’s ‘Iloola Pie’ is a description of the complex and unfolding world of puberty as experienced by a young woman. Confident yet vulnerable, restrained yet bold, she reads the world’s responses to her body and the changes it undergoes with growing awareness. Ashok’s narrative style is distinctive, veering at times towards prose poetry, even while direct and clean in its prose. From puberty to maturity, from inner balance to behaving off kilter, A L Sharada’s ‘The Madwoman of Colaba’, her first short story, is a searing indictment of societal imbalance and the impact of Covid on the poor. A young woman, violated, rejected by her family and surviving on the streets in Bombay with largesse and handouts. And then she gives birth to a baby, and the virus strikes the city…. Sonakhya Samadar, another author debuting in Out of Print writes of divisions and boundaries and separations as understood by a young girl. Titled ‘Barbed Wire’ the girl calls to her cousin across the river Ichhamati and cannot understand why she does not answer back.

Two fine, stories close this editorial summary. Sathya Saran, one of the champions of the short story in India, writes about a marital relationship of which husband and wife have completely different expectations. Centred around a photograph taken before the wedding to which the woman comes prepared to ‘be remembered, shared, liked and treasured forever’ while the man hopes to never repeat the experience, the story emphasises that there are some differences that cannot be resolved. Farah Ahamed draws on her experience of growing up as part of the Indian diaspora in Kenya. ‘Man of Talent’ is set in Nairobi and Dr Patel is a familiar figure in her repertoire, whose perceptions of himself are unrealistic and is known to tie himself into impossible situations. Here, he is in an encounter with a woman police officer for a supposed traffic violation even as he prepares for a promotion that he is sure he will receive but as readers, we are not. Told with humour and a sense of the ridiculous, painting a picture of place and situation, we develop an affection and understanding for the character, even as we laugh.

The art on the cover of Out of Print 40 is by Vibha Galhotra.