Out of Print Blog

Saturday, January 16, 2021

Out of Print Short Story Writing Workshop For Literature at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival

The Out of Print - Kala Ghoda Writing Workshop!

The workshop is free and open to all stories written in English.

The rules are simple - submit a short story (2000 words give/take 200) on the subject of 'Love and Plurality'.

Love with infinite possibility, love across gender, language, community and religion; love in any and all of its shapes and forms.

Participants:

1. are encouraged, indeed, must be willing to share their stories with other participants

2. be available to participate in the interactive session on Mon, 8 Feb, 3-4 pm.

3. be available to participate in the public session on Sat, 13 Feb, 3-4 pm where participants will present excerpts of their work and have a minute to highlight how their work gained from the workshop.

The stories will be judged by the Out of Print editorial team represented by Indira Chandrasekhar, Vandana Devi and Zui Kumar-Reddy and a maximum of 15 stories will be selected. The decision of the Out of Print team is final.

The stories will be :

1) Workshopped with the editorial team that will result in feedback on narrative, language, structure

Email interaction may begin between Feb 1 and Feb 6.

2) Peer reviewed at a panel where participants can gain feedback on their work from the other selected writers:

- Each participant will be given 5-7 minutes in the Zoom workshop session that will be devoted to their work.

- Participants will present summary of their story in 30 seconds

- One of the editorial team will provide feedback.

- Other participants will provide constructive feedback.

3) Shared publicly at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2021.

- Each participant will have 5-7 minutes to present their work

-During that time, they will

a. provide a 30 sec summary of their story

b. Speak about what they gained from the workshop

b. read a 1-2 min excerpt from their work

Last date for submissions : January 20th 2021, Midnight IST

Selected Stories Announced on : Jan 31st 2021, Midnight IST

Submissions should be cut and pasted into the body of an email and sent to outofprint.kgaf@gmail.com

Subject line should read 'OofP at KGAF Workshop'.

Only previously unpublished work will be considered.

Only one entry per participant.

The OutofPrint.KGAF team has the right to ask a participant to leave the workshop if they do not meet the necessary level to profit from the workshop.

We look forward to reading your work!

Out of Print Editorial Team

READING LIST

A growing reading list (optional) that may help trigger ideas for your story submissions:

1. https://indianculturalforum.in/2021/01/08/interfaith-marriage-the-constituent-assembly

2. https://www.outofprintmagazine.co.in/archive/june_2011_issue/Devdutt_Pattanaik.html

3. https://www.outofprintmagazine.co.in/archive/july_2019_issue/swethas-my-old-hometown.html

4. http://outofprintmagazine.blogspot.com/2014/07/dna-out-of-print-short-fiction-shruthi.html

5. http://outofprintmagazine.blogspot.com/2015/11/2015-dna-out-of-print-short-fiction_85.html

6. https://www.outofprintmagazine.co.in/lian-dousel_numbered-days.html

7. https://www.outofprintmagazine.co.in/archive/january_2020-issue/susheela-menon_mating-strategies-of-wild-dolphins.html

THE OUT of PRINT FOCUS SERIES:

Writing Sex at the Time of Corona

Monday, November 16, 2020

OUT OF PRINT: TEN YEARS

COMING SOON

Out of Print: Ten Years

a curated compilation of stories from ten years of Out of Print

Thursday, November 12, 2020

Premise: Dom Teotónio by Maria Elsa da Rocha, translated from Portuguese by Paul Melo e Castro reviewed by Helga do Rosário Gomes

Dom Teotónio by Maria Elsa da Rocha

Translated from Portuguese by Paul Melo e Castro

Reviewed by Helga do Rosário Gomes

Much has been written of the Indo-Portuguese culture of Goa and of the Goan, who grapples with the complexity of being raised in a Catholic and Portuguese-like environment, a culture that only be described as a divergent child of the original Hindu culture. Embedded in a deep-seated caste system and consequent glaring socio-economic differences, separated from her Hindu brethren by partially adopted European habits, the Goan Catholic straddles, melds but often also forcibly creates divides for herself.

Starting from the early nineteenth century, a slew of Indo Portuguese writers has attempted to elucidate these conflicting identities, but none have woven such warm, flawed, struggling, often bigoted and yet quintessentially Goan characters as my aunt, Maria Elsa da Rocha. So many things favoured Maria Elsa’s becoming a writer of stories that were so different from those of her peers. Stories that deceptively flowed like the long rivers of Goa and lulled you into a ‘sossegado’ (peaceful) state until an undercurrent woke you gasping for breath. In life as in her stories, Maria Elsa duelled with her privileged status and large land holdings while so many were scratching the earth. As a young woman, she joined the legions of teachers of the Escola Primária (a network of Government run primary schools) and was posted to distant and seemingly quiet villages and dusty towns and even to Damão, a Portuguese enclave in Gujarat. But, even in the strait-laced society of that time, a bright and observant young woman could still wield the proverbial mighty sword, to spin a kaleidoscope of stories of superstitions, disease but also furtive romances and bandit-ridden roads. Raised in a family where dusks were spent lounging in spacious balções (as the extended porches of Goan homes are known), her ears tingled with long and tall tales offered by those with endless time on their hands. From here, springs ‘Dom Teotónio’ based on a narrative by her maternal uncle of the wedding of his father to the daughter of a Viscount. While Maria Elsa spins us into a world of opulence, luxurious palanquins, brilliant chandeliers and Zardosi panu-baju, she also exposes the meanness and bigotry of Dom Teotonio which furiously surfaces when the artisan Raiu fails to deliver the tiara that his bride will wear at their wedding. Here we see the disdain and disrespect that upper class Catholics held towards working class Hindus where they could desecrate a home or a place of worship with meat, a tainted legacy of conversions and the infamous Inquisition.

While in the digitally connected world of today it is it is hard to imagine that women’s voices and stories were heard then, Goa afforded Maria Elsa many platforms. She narrated her stories to a multitude of listeners of the Portuguese radio program Renascença (Renaissance) aired by the All India Radio. Families gobbled their dinner so that the clank of crockery and cutlery would not mar Prof. Rocha’s powerful narration in Portuguese interspersed with Konkani. In the town of Margão, Maria Elsa was given free rein to contribute to the homespun newspapers that upper crust families produced.

Maria Elsa’s stories, so true in their excellent translations by Paul Melo e Castro can serve as a blueprint for preserving the Goan way of life at a time when it faces relentless assault while also impressing the need to discard the sins of bigotry and economic injustices.

Read Maria Elsa da Rocha’s Dom Teotónio translated from Portuguese by Paul Melo e Castro in Out of Print 38, December 2019.

Reviewer Helga do Rosário Gomes is author Maria Elsa da Rocha’s niece who authorised the story and is able to contextualise the historic references from the perspective of their family history.

#Premise

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Premise: This is Us, and This is Us Outside by Kuzhali Manickavel Reviewed by Farah Ahamed

This is Us, and This is Us Outside by Kuzhali Manickavel

Reviewed by Farah Ahamed

How to leave the reader disorientated and thinking ‘We are all responsible,’ Time and Point of View in Khuzali Manickavel’s 'This is Us, and This is Us Outside'.

The first time I read Kuzhali Manickavel’s stories I was left completely disorientated. I thought it must have been because I missed something, so I went back and reread them. But even the second and third time my head was still whirling. I felt on the one hand connected to the emotional centre of the story, but at the same time distinctly unmoored. The stories have a light, almost playful tone, but this is only an artful and skilful ploy to beguile us from the deeper issues at stake for the author.

Take for instance her very short story, ‘This is Us, and This is Us Outside’, where none of the characters have real names. We are introduced to The Pepsi Girl (later nicknamed Capacity), The Girl with Razor Blades, The Gay Man and The Paracetamol Girl. The choice not to give proper names is curious; it suggests the characters could be anyone, or no one, fictional or real and makes you wonder what Manickavel was trying to hide or show. And why those particular names? Why The Pepsi Girl – was she wearing Pepsi-t-shirt? Did she look like a girl from the Pepsi poster? Who is she really? The same applies to the other characters.

The story begins with a confirmed time frame, location and action, and is told from the first person plural point of view and also more unusually, in the future tense.

‘The Pepsi Girl will puke all over the table in fourteen minutes. We will watch her…’

But by the time we get to the second paragraph which is dotted with, dialogue predicated with, ‘she will say,’ ‘she will not say,’ ‘she will suddenly show,’ ‘she will go,’ ‘we will never,’ the reader is already wondering what Manickavel intends to convey with this host of somewhat reliable characters, and a somewhat, unnamed, unreliable narrator.

The third paragraph is even more disconcerting as the story shifts from the plural to the first person single point of view. It has a few lines of sparse dialogue where the narrator casually introduces and dismisses an imagined or possible, rape scene.

‘I imagine The Pepsi Girl’s unconscious body being passed around a backroom where she is gang-raped by auto drivers, sons of politicians and hotel staff. “I’m sure she’s fine,” I say to The Gay Man.’

The narrator, rather than focusing on the shocking incident, makes a sideways comment about The Gay Man being the first person she’s ever met and how she will never forget him. The effect of this is to leave the reader wondering about what’s really going on, while at the same time, recognising and sympathising with the narrator’s state of mind: how often it is that we ourselves try to hide from thinking about difficult or emotionally inconvenient by focussing on something random.

The fourth paragraph of the story employs both the first person plural and singular and even though the shift is seamless and nothing jars, still something makes us stop and reread the sentences and appreciate their syntax. The core of the dialogue is where the heart of the story lies and burns like a strong flame. We are told, ‘rape’ is an uncomfortable word, and ‘We will all feel responsible.’ This is the crux of it, both for reader and characters.

The next two short paragraphs flit through the existential crisis of the characters, echoing Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be.’ But here it is, ‘to die or not to die.’

‘At first we will decide that she did not die,’ while the paragraph that follows this one begins with, ‘Then we will decide that she did die.’

Both are written in the first person plural and give personal details about The Pepsi Girl, making her almost real and relatable to. But before we can get too close to the burden of dealing with the reality of rape and the inconvenience of it, the narrator quickly shifts our focus to thinking about The Pepsi Girl’s parents and how ‘We will be glad they are not our parents.’

The second last paragraph starts in the first person plural, but the second line shifts to the singular and concentrates on the narrator’s observations and thoughts about the ordinary. But then, unexpectedly, the paragraph closes with a casual racist statement from The Girl with Razor Blades, ‘And white women are such fucking whores,’ she says, to deliberately provoke the white woman at the next table who turns to look at them. The effect of this is to unsettle the reader, forcing us too, to take a closer look at the characters.

The story closes with a final paragraph of only one startling line, told in the first person plural, in the future tense. ‘We will only notice The Pepsi Girl fourteen minutes later, when she pukes all over the table.’ After a whirlwind, starting with ‘The Pepsi Girl,’ a girl without a proper name, and ending with ‘the table,’ a proper noun, we are left wondering what exactly happened to them and to us.

The story is about the emotions of transitory relationships, and confusing, seemingly impersonal, yet lasting encounters which are so prevalent today. It explores how one relates to strangers and friends, individuals and families, and how thoughts arise naturally from observations and casual conversations to help us avoid thinking about what hurts the most. Manickavel’s short story is about the imagined rape and alcohol poisoning of a stranger. Or is it?

The story will take you fourteen minutes or less to read. It will leave you reeling. And later you will decide, ‘We are all responsible.’

Read Kuzhali Manickavel's 'This Is Us and This Is Us Outside' in the first release of Out of Print, Out of Print 1, September 2010.

Reviewer Farah Ahamed’s story Dr Patel appeared in Out of Print 20, September 2015.

Link to #Premise

Thursday, October 1, 2020

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.

Sunday, July 5, 2020

Out of Print 38

Out of Print 38 has been released.

If we were to identify a common theme that runs through the stories in the issue, it would be the idea of being taken to or pushed to an edge where you are faced with the untenable. These stories each deal with that precipice in different ways: by acts of heroism, withdrawal, resignation, hope or simply by entering an other, more tenable, reality.

‘Moon Mountain’ by Bangladeshi writer Shaheen Akhtar is an intense, complex and beautifully paced examination of the lingering generational tragedy that results from uprooting and displacing a people. It is set in the besieged Chittagong Hill Tracts. A young boatman confronts the submergence of his ancestral village lying below him as he ferries ignorant, self-absorbed tourists through the beautiful green waters of the Kaptai Dam. Translated elegantly from Bangla by Kabita Chakma, who is herself from the region, we are honoured to feature it.

Three stories come to their culmination by skirting confrontation in different unexpected ways. Anuradha Kumar’s ‘All the Way to the Twelfth Floor’ is told through the voice of Gauri, the domestic help at the home of an elderly gentleman who lives alone in the adjacent apartment building. The narrative brings the reader back, again and again to the dilemma she faces the moment she feels not his gaze but ‘his wrinkled gnarled hands scaly on her skin’. We follow her up and down the endless steps in the stairwell where she withdraws when crisis hits, an extraordinary escape into the self. ‘The Voice from the Garbage Chute’ by Tanvi Saraf is set in a terrifying dystopian extension of the present pandemic realities. The world is shutting down, the measures of the economy have shifted, those who are still alive are incarcerated in their homes, it is illegal to produce children and extinction is a very real possibility. The main protagonist and her husband have found ways to lead a life, a strange but steady life in this scenario when her equanimity is shaken upon hearing a voice. ‘Young, raw, real. It was coming out of the garbage chute.’ How will she react? The next story ‘Umrao’ by Gatha is set in Delhi, where the police have ‘ended their implicit agreement with vampires and started killing them en masse.’ Mrinal has responded to her mother, Umrao’s frightened plea, ‘there are no humans here’ to protect her, and returned home. The story explores the complexity of an acutely difficult mother-daughter relationship, fraught, cruel, unrelenting yet, sometimes tender, whose emotional intensities drive the protagonists into behaving with both petty and profound meanness.

We feature three stories where the narratives drive the main character over an edge into wild, bizarre, seemingly uncharacteristic extreme behaviour. Suhit Kelkar’s, ‘There’s Another Way’, explores an illicit love affair at the very beginning of its existence. The emotional pressures that each of the characters feels, compounded by the lies and secrecy surrounding their meeting, and most of all, the schism in their expectations leads to a dramatic escalation in his response to the situation. In Michelle D’costa’s examination of the loneliness, the resident hopefulness, and the burgeoning interest in body and sexuality of an earnest and relatively naive young woman, the reader is taken to a festival in a women’s college in Bangalore. Titled ‘The Guy Who Could Dance’, the passing, often deliberate small cruelties that are directed at a newcomer, an outsider to the fold and the inherent anxieties that beset her – ‘He will find out you are a virgin, you haven’t even kissed a guy’ – culminate in a response that she does not know she has in her. ‘Dom Teotónio’ is a historical story, set in Goa by Maria Elsa Da Rocha, one of the last writers who wrote in Portuguese, and translated by Paul Melo e Castro. It recounts the preparation for and wedding of a young nobleman. Opening a window both into the lives of the privileged Portuguese gentry of the past and the relationship between different communities in the region, it ends in a dramatic confrontation evoking satisfying sounds of the crashing of swords and the shattering of glass.

Two of the remaining stories in the issue deal with the limit by not quite arriving at it. Saritha Rao-Rayachoti gives us a story of separation, and the potential of reunion told from the point of view of a young woman looking back at her childhood. The power of this story – that conjures aromas as triggers of memory so strongly that the reader can almost experience them – is that it steers clear of drama and draws the reader towards the edge of emotional fulfilment without quite getting there. Mariya Salim’s ‘Burning’ is a story of domestic abuse and marital rape. The protagonist, the abused wife, never quite confronts the abuse or her abuser for what it is. Rather, she circles, like many in our society, around the situation, justifying the actions of her husband and making excuses for him. Will her understanding of the balance of society ever tip?

The last story in this issue of Out of Print 38, ‘Piece of the Moon’ by Vismay Harani is an unlikely one of adventure and heroism. Young love, an errant lover distracted by his telescope, an ultimatum – a demand for a ‘piece of the moon’ as a proof of true love are the ingredients that make up this warm, sweet, human tale of love.

The extraordinary artwork, a 2015 site specific intervention using gold leaf in Shyam Bazaar, Dhaka, that speaks to every story in the issue, is by Ayesha Sulatana.