Out of Print 34 has
been released, and it’s a great issue – a translation, an excerpt, returning
authors, authors new to Out of Print and one author publishing for the very
first time. We are honoured!
Zui Kumar Reddy’s ‘Oranges’, an excerpt from her
forthcoming novel, The Generation of
Light, brings alight the passion that arises in a young woman, ‘a quadruple
dose of imploding and exploding galaxies’, when she encounters the ‘sexy,
terrifying, mystery thing’ of man whose being hints at a god-like magic from
beyond.
Equally laden with hints of the unattainable is Ila
Ananya’s ‘If I Remember Correctly’, which takes us into a strangely distanced,
yet intimate relationship. They meet and talk every Friday. She does not know
him, does not know if she can trust him, is displaced and in a new place where
her instincts have been ‘swallowed whole’ and she struggles to know who she is.
And he is one of the few with whom she can share this.
Swetha S publishes her first short story, ‘My Old Hometown’
with Out of Print. Gauri is taking
Isha to meet her family in her hometown. The landscape is familiar, the
traditional house unchanged, and Gauri is delighted to feel Isha’s presence in
her childhood house, the only place she has not shared with her so far. Yet,
Gauri is torn, will her parents be able to accept the fact that she has a girlfriend?
Will she be able to cause them pain when a family crisis shakes the household?
Saumya Singh’s ‘New Paint’ is also set in an old house, one
that has been demolished and is in the process of being reconstructed. A visit to
the site throws up memories of a hidden family tragedy that impacts
generations. Love between sisters, and between mother and daughter come into
play as the family home and all it represents is transformed. Yet, these transformations
into the new cannot overcome social barriers, and even she acknowledges the initial spark of interest and attraction,
the protagonist flees from them.
In this psychological thriller, ‘Smoke Rings’ by Neena
Macheel that is set in an old crumbling mansion in Kochi, a woman’s instincts,
obscured and suppressed by both illness and the cultural norms that govern her
family life, sharpen when her son appears to be at threat. Her maternal protective
instinct rises to fore, and the truth no longer seems the most important thing
to adhere to.
In ‘Electric Kettles
Don’t Always Sing’, Barnali Ray Shukla takes the schisms of love, rationality
and tenderness to a wholly other, wilder level. What happens when he, overcome
by the romanticism of love, wants ‘the maple syrup [to]
enter every pore of the crepe in an embrace that was sweet. But Seema insists
on parathas’?’
Finally, we acknowledge the passing of an important writer
from the subcontinent, Enver Sajjad, who died in Lahore on June 6 by publishing
a story by him entitled ‘The Cow’. The story, like the famed eponymous film by
Iranian director Dariush Mehjui, explores the
intensity of the ‘near-mythical relationship’ the animal has with the human, as the story’s
translator, Raza Naeem elaborates.
Nilima Sheikh’s
exquisitely detailed ‘Departure’ brings depth and
fragility to the issue.
