Note 43
This edition of the magazine, Out of Print 43, is an examination of the longer short story and presents works ranging from just over 4000 words to around 9000 words. This is longer than the usual length presented in the magazine. The stories are set in different time periods in India, from the ancient to the contemporary.
Shashi Deshpande’s ‘Death of a Hero’ tells the story of Abhimanyu from the Mahabharata when his father, Arjuna, first learns of his death. Deeply tragic, it lays bare a father’s pain and a mother’s grief. It allows the reader to view the fear, the anxiety and the rage that may beset individuals when confronted with personal loss, but also, importantly, when they are bound, by who they are, to live by the norms of caste and gender that trap and bind them to their trajectories.
Rashid Jahan’s ‘Resolve’, translated by Rituparna Sengupta, is set in colonial India. A young woman, correct and principled, shakes up the complacent status quo and the sliding scale of righteousness with her strict expectations. Her husband, a police officer, a good man, who must negotiate the fine line between pleasing his English superiors and managing a complicated, layered transactional existence is challenged by her ideals. It is a story of family, love, harmony, and the compromises that she is not willing to make.
The two remaining stories thrust the reader into an anxious, edgy, young contemporary world, both, interestingly, referencing world cinema. Alina Gufran’s disturbing ‘Sound Recordist’ is set in a film school in Prague. The protagonist has moved from the corruptions of wealthy Delhi Society to the anonymity of an impoverished and lonely student life in Prague. She takes refuge in recording sound but when confronted with evidence of abuse on set she retreats, aware of all that may be compromised – degree, scholarship, the chance, finally, at attention from her teachers and peers, and more – if she comes forward as a witness.
We read the main character in debut writer, Athul Kishan’s ‘Incarnations of Burnt Memories’ as a delusional young man. His aggrandised sense of himself as a balanced and intellectually superior person persists despite many indications that he is living a warped reality. In a world populated by his confidante Akhil, student Saran, and Saran’s girlfriend, Aiswarya, Arun moves from episode to embarrassing episode on a path that ends in a disastrous and ridiculous confrontation.
The art on the cover of Out of Print 43 is by Lubna Chowdhary.