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Tiger Lessons, Sannapureddy Venkatarami Reddy, translated from the Telugu by Narasimha Kumar
A young man trained to be an engineer finds himself herding his family’s sheep up in the hills one summer and trying to survive the jungle. Ravi comes from a golla family but his father and brother have worked to make sure he does not have to live the sheep-herding life. The physical labour is hard on Ravi but the menace of the wild is harder. He is terrified of the forest and its denizens. Sleep eludes him at night, every little sound a tiger lurking nearby, every root or vine a slithering python. He freezes on the spot when a hyena attacks the sheep, offering his neck to the animal without a fight. Everything he knows and believes is violently put to the test when a tiger begins to hunt his herd.
Nowhere People, Manoranjan Byapari, translated from the Bengali by Anchita Ghatak
Nowhere People chronicles the lives of people living in squatter settlements. They are there and not there. Some have fathers, but no mothers. Some have mothers, but no fathers. And some have neither. And then, some have both, but who are absent from their lives.
As if they live only to perish one day. Their only occupation is to somehow stay alive. Some drive rickshaws, some run errands, some collect scrap, some wash glasses at a hooch shop, and some scale fish at the fish market.
Many uprooted, penniless, vulnerable people, like rickshaw driver Nobo and his friends, live at the Jadavpur station. It is on this heartless soil that delicate saplings spring sometimes.
Nobo’s life takes an unexpected turn when he spots an infant abandoned at the station. Although his friends occasionally lend a hand, it falls to Nobo to take care of the baby.
This is Nobo’s story.
The Fantastic Affair of Despair, Doorva Devarshi
As a newborn India wails into existence, a silent woman labours away in the cramped copy editorial department of a postcolonial magazine. Her days are fraught with the chauvinism of her male colleagues, sanctioned by the founder, Chief, who fancies himself a revolutionary. In the evenings, she returns to a near-peaceful cohabitation with her widowed, opium-addled landlady. But her monotonous life is suddenly interrupted by an act of extreme violence.
Unable to continue living as she had been, the woman enters a self-imposed exile – first in the city of frescoes, and then in a Himalayan dharamshala. Here, she befriends Leela, the pregnant child-bride of an unremarkable godman. Intimately familiar with violence, she notices how it has seeped into every crevice of this valley haunted by the discord between humankind and nature. Even as a fierce storm razes an entire village and a man-eating leopard prowls the ruins by night, political leaders remain occupied with grand ideas of national development, ignoring the victims’ plight.
All this while, the call of the wild emanating from the heart of the valley grows louder, and she cannot help but embark upon a treacherous trek across the mountainous expanse to answer it. What new twist of fate awaits the woman when she comes face to face with the beast?
Cracks in the Wall, Neera Kashyap
Cracks in the Wall is a collection of short stories that deal with attempts to heal. It reveals multi-faceted struggles – mental, familial, societal – individuals confront as they navigate their fears, traumas and desires through their lives. It gives readers a window into the tumult that such a process entails, with insightful but often difficult revelations. Be it a working woman in an abusive marriage who finally finds the courage to seek help, a mother who has to choose between the government and rebels to keep her child safe, a wife who must come to terms with lost motherhood or a marriage stifled by megalomania, these stories mirror deep-rooted fractures both at a personal and social level.
Death of a Gentleman, Riva Razdan
Yuvraaj Khanna is on the brink of the stupendous success he has dreamt about his whole life. His grocery delivery startup has just secured 900 million dollars in valuation, and he is engaged to the beautiful Sanjanaa Gandhi, a doctor from Tony Malabar Hill.
And then, the death of his wealthy father disrupts everything. The father who had abandoned him when he was a child.
A murder investigation unfolds, throwing the spotlight on Yuvraaj and revealing deep-rooted rivalries and unresolved tensions, laying bare the brutal lengths people will go to in their quest for success and social standing.
Saraswati, Gurnaik Johal
Centuries ago, the myths say, the holy river Saraswati flowed through what is now Northern India. But when Satnam arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmother’s funeral, he is astonished to find water in the long-dry well behind her house. The discovery sets in motion a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river and build a gleaming new city on its banks, and Satnam – adrift from his job, girlfriend and flat back in London – soon finds himself swept up in this ferment of nationalist pride.
As the river alters Satnam’s course, so it reveals buried ties to six distant relatives scattered across the globe – from an ambitious writer with her eye on legacy to a Kenyan archaeologist to a Bollywood stunt double – who are brought together in a rapidly changing India.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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