Our City That Year, Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
A city teeters on the edge of chaos. A society lies fractured along fault lines of faith and ideology. A playground becomes a battleground. A looming silence grips the public.
Against this backdrop, Shruti, a writer paralysed by the weight of events, tries to find her words, while Sharad and Hanif, academics whose voices are drowned out by extremism, find themselves caught between clichés and government slogans. And there's Daddu, Sharad's father, a beacon of hope in the growing darkness. As they each grapple with thoughts of speaking the unspeakable, an unnamed narrator takes on the urgent task of bearing witness.
A Bouquet of Dead Flowers: Stories, Swadesh Deepak, translated from the Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt and Sukant Deepak
Among the most uncompromising of modern Hindi prose writers, Swadesh Deepak’s unsettling stories have a profound ability to offer a searing critique of society, of bureaucracy, but also to upend the usual masculine stereotypes found in much literature of our time.
The little boy in “Hunger” who scrounges for leftovers by the station is pleasantly confused by the godown guards’ generosity one day when his sister tags along. The Prime Minister’s imminent visit to their small town, in “No News of Untoward Events”, is too disruptive for the residents to cause much excitement. In “Name a Tree, Any Tree”, the headstrong Maya Bakhshi can’t make sense of her family’s kindness towards Major Ajay Singh, until she does, and the ground slips beneath her feet. Sunila, in “Horsemen”, falls in love with the unnervingly quiet Sukant, who runs mad whenever it snows. There’s an unspoken tension between Naveen and Nimmi in “Dead End”, but the generous hosts at the hotel they’ve come to during this unusual time of the year could never guess why. And in “The Child God”, the Pandit and his family find out just how depraved they can be.
The Day the Earth Bloomed, Manoj Kuroor, translated from the Malayalam by J Devika
The paanar live near forests but do not know how to hunt. There are fields of millet behind their huts but they are unused to sowing or reaping. Tired of depending on song and dance to make a living, and the attendant poverty, the eldest son, Mayilan, runs away from home. Many years later his family sets out to find him. As they roam the land, they perform in village commons and palaces, to farmers and cowherds, and famous kings and even more famous poets.
Set seventeen centuries ago, The Day the Earth Bloomed tells the intertwined stories of Kolumban, his daughter Chithira and his son Mayilan, drawing on the celebrated poems of classical Tamil. The result is an electrifying and haunting connection to the past.
Our Bones in Your Throat, Megha Rao
When Esai arrives at St Margaret’s imposing campus, amidst which lie the mysterious woods, she plunges headfirst into a world of power games, underground recitals, new enemies, and complicated relationships. And then Esai is lured into the arms of something far more dangerous and exciting – a water spirit lurking in the foliage. She stumbles onto an ancient secret that threatens to dismantle the entire college to the bone. Esai knows something the others don’t. She finds herself at the heart of the unrest brewing on campus, alongside Scheher. Scheher, once her only friend, is now a formidable face of dissent. What happens when those you fought for once, turn against you?
The Continents Between, Bani Basu, translated from the Bengali by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
Looking over their shoulder at the home they left behind, the lives of immigrants Sudeep and Kamalika are suffused with a permanent sense of nostalgia. This is America in the 1960s, and it throws up all the challenges and insecurities they must fight against as they raise their rather American children in a conventional Bengali household.
The Menstrual Coupé, Shahina K Rafiq, translated from the Malayalam by Priya K Nair
In Shahina Rafiq’s carefully crafted stories, women fantasise about genies as well as murders, dive into hidden worlds, and seek to wrest control of their lives. Slipping past the tedium of homemaking and the frustration at husbands and fathers, they travel, stick together like migrating birds, and poke fun at the imposing patriarchal world.
