A Note on her story 'LIKE A SCENE FROM A MOVIE' by author ANJUM HASAN that appears in Out of Print 60
A chance meeting with a reader the other day, a fellow Bangalorean who said he’d liked this story, led me back to it – something I wrote twenty years ago and had all but forgotten. It appeared in an anthology called Twenty-One Under Forty published by Zubaan in 2007 but didn’t make it to either of my later short story collections. When this reader said it was hard to imagine today a traffic policeman who ponders things; and also that there was a time when most everyone he knew wanted to move to America, I didn’t know what he meant. So I went home and dug out the piece, finding it full of now anachronistic details one can all too easily be sentimental about. The narrator is often walking to the bus-stop to get to somewhere unhurriedly on a bus; he has a small income from reviewing novels for the papers; he slips into an internet café to send emails, and there are sentences of gobsmacking innocence such as 'I called Nikhil on his mobile phone'. And yes, it features an off-beat traffic policeman. None of these were the main point when I wrote the story, they were just the plain weave of everyday life into which the plot had been worked.
But now these elements stood out. The old and the new are held in balance at this early millennium juncture – the city has a past discernible in those still leisurely rhythms and a present in which not just mobile phones and the internet but also the narrator himself are new to Bangalore. He experiences the city as a place of risk and opportunity but in an altogether modest register, not in that market-hungry, obsessively entrepreneurial, boisterously expansionist way that would soon come to be linked with this city. And America promises middle-class success but also, to one character, somewhere you go to break free, to know a dizzying freedom from responsibility. That adventure too now, likely, a thing of the past. So rather than create nostalgia for what was, the story could, two decades on, merely stand as a measure of how swiftly and surely we have arrived at this situation: of the world simply being too much with us. And that is something – the clogged surfeit which means there’s nothing to look forward to and no way to go back – it is harder to make fiction from.
Anjum Hasan, May 2026
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Out of Print 60 |
