Out of Print 33

Out of Print 33

Out of Print 33 pays tribute to two literary figures of the subcontinent, the Urdu writer, Mustansar Hussain Tarar who celebrated his eightieth birthday at the beginning of March, and the Hindi writer, Krishna Sobti who passed away in January this year. We present a translation by Daisy Rockwell titled ‘The Currency Has Changed’ of Sobti’s first short story that Sobti said, launched her as a writer. We thank Raza Naeem for bringing our attention to Tarar’s birthday and sending us his translation of the story ‘Baba Bagloos’. It weaves around the brutality inherent in the system that resulted in the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

We also feature two love stories. Parineeta Singh’s ‘The House on Fox Hill’,draws the reader in with its charming, hopeful yet ineffectual protagonist who brings to mind some of the young men in R K Narayan’s stories. His winsome young neighbour’s interest in his adventures as a detective in a haunted house, lead to the realisation of his love. Ewa Mazierska ‘Shopping And Longing In Goa’ is set in Panjim and is told from the point of view of a tourist shopping in the city. An outsider, she views each small overture with scepticism. As she wanders through the city, drinking tea and buying things she does not need, one particularly brusque shopkeeper changes the course of her journey.

Other works in the edition are by Noor Niamat Singh’s and Ananya Dasgupta’s. Noor Niamat Singh’s ‘The Semicircle of Life’, her first publication, is an extraordinary journey into the mind of a young woman as she identifies emotional and psychological rafts to help her maintain stability as she deals with an unstable mother, a concerned circle of loved ones and a pregnancy she feels distanced and detached from.

‘Regret’ by Ananya Dasgupta is a sensitive and honest examination of a young woman’s foray into being a teacher’s aide to a couple of underprivileged children in Boston. A chance encounter, many years later, brings the narrator face to face with her inability to break through to one young man and the many layers of regret embodied therein.

The art work, the extraordinary ‘Leaking Lines (Radcliffe Line)’ by Reena Saini Kallat, 2018 references the boundary demarcation line between the Indian and Pakistani portions of the Punjab and Bengal provinces of undivided India that was published on 17 August 1947.