Awards: Out of Print Author and Guest Editor, Annie Zaidi, Awarded

Annie Zaidi has won the US $100,000 Nine Dots Prize for 2019-2020.

The intention of the prize is to encourage innovative thinking that addresses contemporary issues and Zaidi’s entry ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus’ explores concepts of home and belonging rooted in her experience of contemporary life in India. A book she will develop, based on her Nine Dots Prize-winning essay will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2020. The book will examine how a citizen’s sense of ‘home’ might collapse, or be recovered. Themes it will address include:

·     The politics and economics of death in India, and how the physical performance of last rites for the dead can lead to a sense of dislocation and the unmooring of living citizens

·     How industrial townships are created on the back of a series of dislocations, and what this means for citizens’ relationships to the land

·     The crossing of caste and religious lines in marriage, and the abuse of political power to violently disrupt or prevent the mixing of bloodlines

·     The Partition of India as a great cultural and emotional sundering, ultimately triggering an aggressive nationalism that seeks a negative self-definition rather than a positive one

·     The struggle to belong to a city when it changes in all recognisable forms, even down to its name, and when it is stripped of all the original springs of cultural affinity

Zaidi has been part of the Out of Print family, published stories in Out of Print and worked as a guest editor on the special Urdu edition of the magazine, and we wanted to take a moment to congratulate her on this exciting achievement. 

When we reached out to her, she was kind enough to send us a beautiful poem, a sonnet, that explores the meaning of roads that lead … to home, to Rome. So, in celebration, we share this with our readers. 

Sonnet 4: R/h/ome.

All the roads that lead to Rome
started out wanting to twist away
from any place that smelled like home
or any face that bade them stay.

All roads bleed out of arms
wrenched free of cradle nights,
taped down with screaming tar
and fringed about with fairy lights.

All the roads that led to you 
were paved with shards of broken sleep.
You were walking barefoot too:
How's it you failed to bleed?

Ah, twisted wends, yet twisting home.
All these roads besieging Rome.

(C) Annie Zaidi

Links to Zaidi's stories and to the special Urdu edition she edited with Out of Print:

Sujatha in Out of Print 5, 2011.

The story follows a young woman confronted with violence who will go to all lengths to survive.

Inverter in Out of Print 16, 2014

The protagonist establishes a silent connection with a person who lives across the street, a delicious, seductive connection. Layers of social norms come in to play as the narrative weaves in and out of the darkness of summer power outages in Kanpur.

Out of Print 28, 2017

Short story writing in Urdu, called 'afsana-nigari', is just over a century old. The literary cannon in this genre includes names like Premchand, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Qurratulain Hyder, Krishan Chander, Naiyer Masud, and of course, Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai. 

The 28th issue of Out of Print, devoted to Urdu short fiction translated into English, features a selection of fine stories chosen by Zaidi.

Premise: 'Escaping The Mirror' by Farah Ghuznavi, reviewed by Nidhi Arora

Escaping The Mirror by Farah Ghuznavi

Reviewed by Nidhi Arora

‘Escaping the mirror’ by Farah Ghuznavi is a story about a seven-year-old girl, Dia, who is accosted repeatedly by a young man employed by her family. This man, Minhas, is her father’s driver. A friendship that appears innocent at first, turns ugly as Minhas begins to make inappropriate advances. When Dia protests, he threatens to tell her family, who he claims will believe him over her. The seven-year-old girl does not find this difficult to accept. On the rare occasions when she does muster the courage to tell her parents, they fail to understand or believe her. This, more than Minhas’s fearless stalking, lies at the heart of the story.

Her parents are righteous and pious and treat their servants well. When little Dia tells them in her seven-year-old vocabulary that she doesn’t like the way Minhas looks at her, they make light of it. Instead, they pull her up for not liking him because he is a servant. Is it blind trust, naivety or plain burying their head in sand for an issue too uncomfortable to acknowledge? Whatever it is, Minhas knows it and feeds on it.

With no one to talk to, Dia comes to believe that this is happening to her because she is indeed a ‘bad person’. Left on her own to defend herself against this menace lurking everywhere in her house, she develops her own tactics. She becomes physically alert, looking over her shoulder to make sure he is not around, avoids playing in places where he might have access to her. The once exuberant girl becomes quiet and introverted. Again, no one notices, let alone trying to find out why.

Over time Minhas gives up stalking her actively, but continues to stare at her from the rear-view mirror. Dia is unable to escape his stares in the confines of the car. That Minhas does not physically abuse her and eventually goes away from her life comes as little relief.

Years later, there comes a moment when Dia tells her father what happened and he finally understands. As the realisation dawns on him, he holds his head in hands.

The very little that is said about the mother throughout the story, speaks volumes about her role in her daughter’s life. It is also, perhaps, a broader comment on women’s failure to stand up for each other in matters of personal dignity and shame.

The story is told in a simple and direct style, which helps to deliver this distressing account of a young girl’s loss of childhood and innocence in its full impact. We are not told where and when this happens, which is just as well, because it is a universal story. In light of the recent #MeToo revelations, it is a powerful reminder that abuse is often very close at home and that the loneliness of the ordeal is sometimes more painful than the ordeal itself.

Read Farah Ghuznavi's 'Escaping the Mirror' in Out of Print 18, which was the issue themed around sexual and gender violence published March 2015.

Reviewer Nidhi Arora’s ‘It Is in The Eyes’ appeared in Out of Print 32, September 2018.

Link to #Premise