Sanjana Thakur, a 26-year-old writer from Mumbai won the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story “Aishwarya Rai”. She will receive a cash prize of £5,000.

Taking its name from the Bollywood actor, “Aishwarya Rai” reimagines the traditional adoption story: a young woman, Avni, chooses between possible mothers housed in a local shelter. The first mother is too clean; the second, who looks like the real-life Aishwarya Rai, is too pretty. In her small Mumbai apartment with too-thin walls and a too-small balcony, Avni watches the laundry turn in her machine, dreams of stepping into white limousines, and tries out different mothers from the shelter. One of them must be just right…

Sanjana Thakur, who is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at UT Austin’s New Writers Project, described her story as a “Mumbai story”. She added: “I’ve spent ten out of 26 years living in countries not my own. India, where I’m from, is simultaneously strange and familiar, accepting and rejecting. Writing stories is a way for me to accept that Mumbai is a city I will long for even when I am in it; it is a way to remake ‘place’ in my mind…”

The Chair of the judges, Ugandan-British novelist and short story writer Jennifer Nansubuga said, “In ‘Aishwarya Rai’, Sanjana Thakur employs brutal irony, sarcasm, cynicism and wry humour packaged in tight prose and stanza-like paragraphs to confront us with the fracturing of family and the self as a result of modern urban existence. No matter which city you live in, you’ll recognise the stress-induced conditions like insomnia, restless leg, panic attacks and an obsession with a celebrity kind of beauty, in this case, Bollywood. Thakur pushes this stinging absurdity as far as to suggest hiring mothers to replace inadequate ones. Rarely do we see satire pulled off so effortlessly.”

Thakur is the third Indian to win the prize after Kritika Pandey won it in 2020 for her story “The Great Indian Tee and Snakes” and Parashar Kulkarni in 2016 for “Cow and Company”.

Here’s a short excerpt from the story which was published in Granta.

The first mother Avni brings home is too clean. She wears white at all times, perpetually a mourner, and roams the two-bed flat with a feather duster tied to her slim wrist. “Don’t I look just like Aishwarya Rai?” she asks, and pours bleach into the bathtub and onto her body. Scrub-a-dub-dub. Avni asks her no questions and takes her straight back.

At the shelter, they lead her to the back and shoot her. “She’s had multiple placements,” they explain. “Sometimes, this is the humane option.”

The second mother is mean, and very, very beautiful. This one actually does look like Aishwarya Rai, Avni thinks. A star. She buys a weighing scale and makes Avni stand on it and watch the numbers wobble.

“Too high!” she decides when they steady.

“Let’s play a game,” Avni says, stepping off the scale. She crosses her arms over her body and watches as she shrinks in the mirror. “Would you rather have a fat, happy daughter, or a daughter who is thin and sad?”

The second mother doesn’t hesitate: “Thin.”

“And sad.”

“Yes,” she agrees.

Avni nods. “How do you sleep?”

“Too well,” she confesses. “Like a baby.”

The shelter people take her back, no problem. She has a highly desirable look, they say, and will find another home quickly. And does Avni want to take another look around?

Avni does.

The third mother is sad. All she talks about is the village she came from, where she’d had cows and babies who all died one by one. She’d longed for a living child her whole life, she says, but Avni has never been to a village, nor once felt the urge to milk cows.

“Did you love your husband?” she says, and when the third mother nods, asks why.

“My choices were to love him or not,” she says. “And loving him seemed easier.”

“That’s a good answer,” says Avni, and decides to keep her, at least for a while.

Also read:

‘I even dream in Hinglish’: Meet the Asia winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize