Out of Print 39

Ten years ago, in September 2010, editors Samhita Arni, Mira Brunner and I released the first issue of Out of Print with hope that it would develop into an important platform for short fiction bearing a connection to the Indian subcontinent. I am proud that we have been able to do so. I am grateful to our designers and technical consultants, to the Out of Print editors for their sharp, critical engagement, to our sponsors Brothers Twain whose faith has meant everything, and to the artists and most importantly, to the writers and translators, and the readers who have supported us over the years.

For this edition of Out of Print, after much deliberation, I decided to honour the tenth year by doing what we do best, publishing short fiction selected from the diverse submissions we receive. 

We present ten stories in Out of Print 39. Although the world appears to be adapting to the presence of the virus and is teetering towards a new normal, a strange sense of alienation and isolation continues to pervade the stories. 

Nighat Gandhi was part of our first release ten years ago, so we are doubly pleasedto feature her recent, ‘The Void’ in this issue. Two women, friends, visit Sarnath early one Sunday morning – an unusual occurrence if the responses of the people around are to be believed. Told with a quiet distanced tone, the story explores loneliness, friendship, isolation and the ‘horrible, deep, gaping emptiness’ inside with extraordinary attention.  Also examining isolation, Charanjeet Kaur’s ‘Grilles’ takes us to an apartment building in Mumbai, where an older woman, whose age and illness keep her housebound, observes the difficult life of a woman who lives on the ground floor. When the two meet after the protagonist’s stint in hospital, they both laugh when the latter says to the former, ‘He cursed us both. Said that we are sure to infect each other.’ It is an extraordinary emotional moment in the narrative.

In Saudha Kasim’s ‘The Living Hours’, a young woman walks us through the complex landscape of grief that the loss of her mother leaves her with. She revisits the difficulty of caring for her sick mother over many years and the sacrifices thatentailed, the resentment at the selfishness of a woman whom she had thought of as a friend and business partner whose shallow words of caring mean nothing, and the anger that leaves her burning the air around her. The story leaves us with a profound impression of loneliness. Selina Sheth’s ‘In Three Months a Tree’ also addresses the loss of a mother, this time in the immediate aftermath of her death. She has been dead for three hours, after ‘eleven excruciating days of kidney dialysis and chemo’ that the daughter, clinging to hope, put her through. There are practical things that need to be arranged, priests who have no understanding of the depth of her link with her mother, cremations that have to be witnessed and the passing kindness of an officiating supervisor that finally allow her to moor herself and envisage a way to grieve her mother. Another story of loss, one that manifests in a bizarre manner is Barnali Ray Shukla’s ‘Return Gift’. Her mother-in-law has died, and the protagonist is all alone in an empty house. Or is she? The apartment speaks to her in her mother-law’s voice. As she stands at her mother-in-law’s bathroom mirror, she catches sight of something move behind her. The room has been cleared out and aired, yet she discovers the older woman’s dentures. And then, there is the smell. The narrative is twisted and atmospheric, and the ending, completely unexpected.

Manasi’s ‘Window unto Darkness’ translated from Malayalam by Rithwick Bhattathiri draws the reader spiralling into the protagonist’s despair and desolation. ‘Oblivious to the blossoming of the flowers … oblivious to the comfort from the blowing of the wind’, she catches sight of her husband and children sleeping and asks herself, as if she has control of what might happen, ‘Between the darkness and them, who will I choose?’ 

Equally intense, although evoking a different kind of emptiness, Alina Gufran’s ‘Orange Juice’ is about the unravelling of a young woman as she loses control, driven by her compulsive obsession with a man. Her ‘episodes of mania, anger, depression’, the ‘innocuous white pill’ followed ‘by thirteen hours of bleeding’ that rid her of her pregnancy, the ‘burst of star-shaped white light’ that incapacitates her with pain, all paint a picture of descent and despair.

Pranab Jyothi Bhuyan takes the reader into a world that is in complete contrast to the urban nightmare of the previous story. ‘Hidden Treasures’ is set in a village in rural Assam, and describes how Lakhiram deals with the extraordinary transformation of his daily existence when his wife becomes possessed by a Mata. Dawood Siddiqui’s ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ is a story that lightens the spirit with its irony, despite the dark setting and twisted plot. The main protagonist, a brutish police guard who bullies a passing doctor, encouraging his men to beat him up, and shouts at his young wife, must confront his vulnerability. ‘The Twice-born River’ by Swarnalatha Rangarajan is a story of hope. The misuse of the environment has destroyed a river. The village has stories with an ancient reach that explain why the river is gone. Until, one day a young man and his friends arrive to investigate the place, and he begins to ask about how the river was nurtured in the past and, ultimately, the river is reborn.

The cover image, created by designer Yamuna Mukherjee, is a conglomerate of the covers from the previous ten years.