Note 42
If one were to suggest a phrase that unites the stories in the September 2021 release of Out of Print it could be mind play. Every story takes the protagonist on an acutely individual journey in which perceptions shift and tease reality.
Anxiety and an unflinching self-examination drive ‘Inertia’ by Abhimanyu Acharya. A new teacher, whose equilibrium is held steady by a most tenuous thread, is teaching the properties of gaseous substances on her first day. She tells the students that even though they cannot see the air, they can experience it, and that everything they experience has weight. When things unravel, we are left with the image of her feeling the weight of her own wild and uncontrollable experience.
Pranab Jyoti Bhuyan offers us a tense insight into the deadly realities of an insurgency. In ‘Unwanted’, readers are given both a macroscopic and microscopic lens through which to view a state of political unrest and rebellion. What starts off as a quiet family dinner, turns into a terrifying night of hiding, dark rooms and gunshots, but what happens to the people at stake, who are they beyond just what they stand for?
Amrita Lall begs the impending question of the times ‘How does one really process trauma’ in her story, ‘California Sunshine’. In a visually exciting and vivid piece we follow the protagonist on her journey of coping with grief and trauma using LSD. The reader can’t help but empathise with the fragmented anxieties, detachment, memories and larger than life visuals that Amrita brings to us in this complex piece.
Samhita Arni enters the supernatural in her vivid, plot-driven story, ‘Fate’. Cinematic and dramatic in scope, we realise, as we read, that we are offered windows into the unexpected twists and turns in the trajectory of a person’s life. At the core of the story is the question the narrator and main character remembers the other key character asking, which is ‘whether a man’s fate was ordained from the moment he was born, or whether it was something he made?’
Lakshmikanth Ayyagari’s ‘The Account Officer’s Wife’ features a sixteen-year-old who grows up while negotiating the ritual complexities of the household in the Brahmin village into which she has been married. She is not unconscious of the elevated status of her handsome husband, he is kind, but the act of consummation is painful. When she does not conceive and her world falls apart, she is only able to bring back some measure of control and autonomy by shattering the impediments that regulate her behaviour.
The hope implicit in the title ‘The Right Man is Just around the Corner’ by Prateek Nigam is laden with tragedy. Reminiscent of some of Vasudhendra’s works*, it subtly reverses the observational lens in the course of its narrative, so the reader moves from looking at the scene through the protagonist’s viewpoint to looking at the protagonist himself. Towards the end of a transitory evening, the main character’s statement, ‘I absolutely wouldn’t mind doing this every day’ is deeply touching because it is so unattainable.
Out of Print was on a hiatus after the release of its March 2021 edition due to a variety of crazy, life-shattering events. In that time, however, editor, Zui Kumar Reddy with our intern, Navya Sahay shook up our somewhat distracted social media presence. We are now on InstaLive, almost every Friday evening at 8 pm, in conversation with an Out of Print author. These engagements have allowed the Out of Print editorial team to expand viewpoints, understand other writers’ processes and share experiences not just in their roles as editors, but as writers. You may find links to the Out of Print ‘Craft vs Impulse’ sessions here.
The art on the cover of Out of Print 42 is by Alka Dass.