Tag: Penguin India

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Interview Review

A Book about Books that Explores a Serendipitous Space for All Readers

An conversation with Kanupriya Dhingra with a brief introduction to her book, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, published by Speaking Tiger Books.

“Most Sundays, I found myself walking alongside hundreds of others for whom Daryaganj was, and continues to be, the primary site of book buying. It was democratic, messy, inclusive, sometimes illegal, often chaotic, but always alive.” 

-- Kanupriya Dhingra, Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public

Perhaps, Kanupriya Dhingra’s Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, could be seen as a democratisation of the process of reading. In an ethnographic study of a book bazaar that springs up every Sunday, Dhingra familiarises us with the historicity of the culture of a bazaar, of reading and even locates its roots in the Mughal Faiz Bazaar from the time of Shahjahan (1592-1666).

In an earlier article dated 2020, she had written about the bazaar: “Historian Sohail Hashmi says that Akbarabadi Begum, one of Shahjahan’s wives, built this market in its earliest form. Several historical maps of Delhi show the existence of ‘Faiz Bazaar’ in this area. The name, Daryaganj, itself means ‘a market across a river’, where ‘Darya’ refers to a river (here, the river Yamuna) and ‘Ganj’ refers to a site where trade is conducted. It was not always the same product that was traded here; Daryaganj only became synonymous with the sale of used, rare, pirated books in the 1960s. According to locals, Daryaganj started as a consumer goods market, set up adjacent to the walls between Subhash Park and Kasturba Gandhi Hospital. There were vinyl records and hand-mounted record players, radios, transistors, mechanical goods, medical goods and used clothes; books too found their place. After a few minor relocations not significantly far away from the lanes of Daryaganj, a few booksellers moved to the now absent ‘Lohe ka Pul‘ (Iron Bridge), near Golcha Cinema, from where the street market began to expand. Before its recent relocation to a nearby site by the name of Mahila Haat, the bazaar extended till Delite Cinema Hall. The structure of the market appeared like a long ‘L’, with books stacked on the sidewalks of Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Road, and more than 250 vendors.”

Dhingra continued spellbound by the ‘magic’ of this bazaar when she visited it as a child and then, as a university student. Coming from a small town, where bookshops that stocked more than textbooks were a rarity, she supported the booksellers when they protested the ‘legalisation’ and the relocation of the bazaar to a newer site in 2019 and wrote of it in Himal Southasian in an article titled, ‘The death of a book bazaar’.

The book gives fascinating glimpses of booksellers and book buyers, of connoisseurs and of students striving for upward economic mobility in the job market. It houses parents, children, old people and young, book lovers, browsers, students, teachers and more. Dhingra asserts: “A republic, in its original sense, is a res publica—a public thing, a commons, something that belongs to everyone who participates in it. Not owned, not curated, not gatekept. The Patri Kitab Bazaar[1] is exactly this: a space where a rickshaw puller and an IAS officer, a first-generation student and a shauqeen[2] collector, a vendor from Uttar Pradesh and a buyer from Assam all have equal claim to the same pile of books.”

One of the most fascinating stories that emerges is of the Om Bookstore — that can be found in major malls across Delhi and many major cities of India — and Om Books International. Dhingra met the founder Om Mago and this is what she wrote: “Om Mago told me that when he first came to Daryaganj, there was no bazaar to speak of—just a few men who had found this way of living. Books that did not belong anywhere, that had potential afterlives, had been discovered as a sellable commodity. ‘There was need in Delhi, and there were books.’ From that simple equation, he learnt the trade, built connections across Delhi and Mumbai, and gradually transformed a pavement enterprise into what Om Books International is today.”

Dhingra has gathered details from booksellers and connoisseurs. Connoisseurs like Sohail Hashmi and Abdul Sattar gave her historic antecedents while bloggers like, Mayank Austen Soofi, who runs the highly coveted The Delhi Walla blog, and claims to idolise Arundhati Roy and have met her in the bazaar, shared more recent perspectives. Soofi “has been passing in and out of the same neighbourhoods for more than a decade, documenting the minutest social and cultural changes” as the New Yorker noted, giving almost a ‘Proustian quality’ to his posts on Delhi. 

Dhingra has noticed that selling books is largely confined to men though women buyers are visible. She sees a difference in approach among the genders, which is an interesting observation, given the fact that Delhi is known for its discriminatory attitude towards women. 

What I found most fascinating about the book was the capture of local colours, though the focus was more centred on discussions around North Indian languages. It has interesting snippets like a man who operates pirated books out of the dickey of his car, lodging his ware near an ATM. Dhingra tells us: “At the Patri Kitab Bazaar, pirated books are called D ki kitab—where D refers to duplicate and/or digital.” She mentions too, a publisher that brings out ‘Guru Chela’ ( Master- Disciple) booklets.  “There were some 100 colourful booklets with miscellaneous titles of useful literature in Hindi, English, and Hinglish.” These were a mix of write- ups on ‘useful’ tips as well as popular jokes and light literature. Along with these, the vendor sold things like “pocketknives, razors, scissors, tiny notebooks, used fountain pens, old wristwatches and their band.” She also found stalls selling old film posters, lyrics and even ancient coins! A copy of the Lolita (1955, written by Vladimir Nabokov in English) translated to Hindi finds mention. “I found a copy of Lolita in the bazaar once—in Hindi. The title only mentioned Lolita in Hindi, and there was nothing else on the cover except a woman’s portrait. There were no copyright claims inside the paratextual pages—no author, no publisher. For a reader or buyer who is not familiar with Nabokov and his works, it is just another novel in Hindi.”

She makes one feel it’s a must to visit the bazaar, perhaps, with a copy of her book in hand! Her style is smooth, evocative and flows well. Dhingra has a passion which translated to a whole book reflecting a community that is unique in the very fact of its existence, tied loosely by the love of books – not necessarily reading. We interviewed her to discuss her journey and here’s how she responded:

Kanupriya Dhingra

“As an ethnographer of the city streets, I am constantly reminded of the transformative power of walking. It allows us to uncover hidden stories, forge unexpected connections, and shape the world around us.” Can you please elaborate on this “transformative power” and how the bazaar forms and unforms every Sunday?

Until 2019, since the 1970s, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar was set up between two landmark cinema halls in Old Delhi — Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Road and Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Road. On any other day, this L-shaped part of the street carried the ordinary rhythms of a working city: government offices, shops and traders, food outlets, traffic on the road. On Sundays, those rhythms would change. Iron and cardboard boxes, tarpaulin sheets, and books spread across the footpath, using the closed shutters of offices as their display backdrop. The bazaar did not occupy the street so much as it temporarily rewrote it. What ethnography taught me to pay attention to is precisely this rewriting of the space that is overdetermined during the week, claimed by traffic and routine and competing uses, is briefly re-scripted by the arrival of booksellers and readers. And then, by evening, unscripted again. Books would go back in their boxes, the tarpaulins were folded, and the footpath was simply itself  — flat and indifferent. The street would forget entirely what stood on it. But the people remembered.

Can you tell our readers what is ethnography? Why did you feel the need to do an ethnographic study on the Sunday book bazaar? What would be the target readership of your very well researched book?

Ethnography, at its simplest, is the method of sustained and repeated presence in a place and trying to understand a world on its own terms. What it is not is a survey, an archive search, or a one-time interview. It is slow and embodied. It is, also, deeply dependent on the trust of the people who agree to let you into their working lives.

Because the bazaar exists outside the formal structures that usually produce archives, there are no official records of this market. The only way to know it is to go there, repeatedly, over years, and listen. The book is built from those years of fieldnotes, interviews, and observations. While the formal fieldwork for my doctoral thesis happened in 2019, I had been a regular for a while. I continued spending Sundays at the bazaar across seasons, displacements, and a pandemic. With the support of the booksellers, I documented the 2019 protests in urgent media reports as well, to produce an immediate archive of what happened to the bazaar, instead of waiting to revisit my notes only while writing my thesis.

As for who the book is for — I resisted writing a book that only scholars could read. The Sunday Book Bazaar is for the student who recognises Usha with her handwritten list of textbooks — one that has scope for a few other ‘finds’ because her pocket money allows for it, here, at the bazaar. It is for the shauqeen who recognises their own Sunday morning in these pages. It is for the Delhi reader who has been going to the bazaar for years without quite knowing why. It is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible. The research is rigorous, I hope. But the book is for everyone.

You have mentioned the absence of women among the sellers. The few that are there do not even see themselves as sellers but as temporary fixtures in lieu of their husbands. Can you tell us why in the twenty-first century women are still being segregated in the bazaar? Is it justified?

The question of women at the bazaar is more nuanced than it first appears. Women vendors are not absent. Quite a few have been running stalls at Daryaganj for years, some for decades, even if it means supporting their brother or husband or son. What is more important, and what my fieldwork revealed, is that many of them do not claim the identity of bookseller. When I asked directly, the answers were careful, deflective, or simply negative. One vendor, who had been managing her late husband’s stall with evident expertise for decades, told me that this work belongs to men because women cannot “lift heavy books”. Another, who had joined the bazaar more recently, had also lost her husband. She was selling the stock he had gathered over the years, keeping the stall going until her son was old enough to take over. But it was more than that, she said, “He passed away on a Sunday, after selling books at the bazaar. That has to mean something.”

Cities give women this kind of ironic independence. The bazaar is one of its more interesting examples. Anonymity in the crowd, the freedom to occupy public space on their own terms, the economic agency that comes from handling money and stock and customers without anyone particularly watching. And yet the identity, the word bookseller, with its history and its community and its authority, remains something many women at the bazaar do not claim for themselves. The crowd hides them, and that hiding is simultaneously a form of freedom and a form of erasure.

You have also noticed that women buyers are different from men. How and why? Please elaborate. Is this a reflection of the culture/ accepted norm of the city/ the sellers and visitors?

Women’s time in public spaces, especially in Delhi, is measured differently. They negotiate with surveillance and scrutiny. Their purposefulness is driven by necessity. They arrive with clearer lists and are less likely to linger without a specific destination in mind. A woman spending two hours browsing a pavement book market on a Sunday morning is doing something that requires more social permission than the equivalent activity does for a man.

And yet the bazaar’s openness, its visibility from the street, and the absence of walls and thresholds made it more accessible to women than many other public spaces in the city. Even Mahila Haat[3] tends to offer an interior that might feel safer, allowing a new scope for purposeless wandering. Moreover, on a public footpath or inside a gated haat, among other people, that openness is precisely what makes the bazaar feel usable for many women readers. What they do with that openness reflects the social conditions they navigate to get there, not their relationship to books, which is as varied and as shauqeen as anyone else’s.

One of the things that your book makes me wonder is — is book piracy justified? What do you think?

I want to be clear first: I do not support piracy, and it is illegal. That is not a complicated position for me. What is complicated is the context in which piracy at Daryaganj exists and the questions that context raises.

After the March 2026 raid by the Crime Branch in Rohini, in which over twenty thousand books were seized — titles by Arundhati Roy, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, James Clear, among others — Penguin India posted about it on social media. The comments were quite instructive. Readers responded not with sympathy for the publisher but with a straightforward observation: books are not affordable. The original editions of the seized titles cost several hundred rupees each. The pirated edition costs a fraction of that.

I am not using this to justify piracy. I am using it to point to the structural failure that makes piracy legible to so many people as a reasonable response. The formal publishing market has not solved the affordability problem. The bazaar, in its informal and sometimes illegal way, tends to fill that gap, albeit partially. The more interesting question is not whether piracy is right or wrong but what its persistence tells us about the gaps the formal book economy has created and, at the moment, cannot fulfil. A reading public that cannot afford books is not served by enforcement alone.

You have written of “a densely competitive educational ecosystem shaped by chronic state underfunding, unequal infrastructure, and the relentless neoliberal promise of upward mobility through credentialism. In this context, the bazaar does more than sell books: it acts as an unofficial welfare infrastructure, absorbing and responding to gaps produced by shrinking public support and rising private costs.” Please elaborate how the bazaar supports aspirants of upward mobility. Does it help close the gaping gaps we notice among different socio-economic, ethnic groups that exist within the given polity?

The phrase unofficial welfare infrastructure came out of a specific observation: that the buyers I met at Daryaganj were not, in the main, casual browsers. They were people for whom the price of a book at a formal bookshop was a genuine obstacle. Students preparing for competitive examinations. First-generation readers with no family library to draw on. Aspirants using books as tools for a different life.

The state has not solved the problem of access to books. School libraries are underfunded. Public libraries are underused and often inaccessible. The formal book market serves readers who can afford it. The bazaar, entirely without subsidy or policy support, has for six decades been doing what the state has not: putting books within reach of people who need them.

Does it close socio-economic gaps? Partially, and imperfectly. It reduces the cost of access. It creates a space where the student with fifty rupees and the collector with five hundred rupees stand at the same stall. But it does not solve the structural problems that create those gaps — underfunding, unequal infrastructure, the credentialism that makes books feel like necessities rather than pleasures. What it does is something more modest and more important: it refuses to accept that books should only be available to those who can afford them at full price.

What has been your most interesting experience in this bazaar? Please share it with us.

There is one moment I return to often. It was 28 July 2019, a Sunday, a few weeks into my formal fieldwork. I was walking from Delhi Gate Metro Station toward the bazaar, headphones on, no music, mentally preparing for the day’s interviews. My phone rang. It was Qamar Saeed, the vendor I had come to know as the ‘King of Daryaganj’, “Madamji, bazaar uth gaya hai. Aap jaldi aaiye.” Madamji, the bazaar has been lifted. Come quickly.

I walked faster. My mind had gone quiet. No fieldwork instincts, no questions forming. Just the turn onto Netaji Subhash Marg, and then the footpath. It looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed: how completely the same it looked. The shutters were where they always were. The traffic moved. A guard sat outside the closed bank, reading his phone. And then I looked at the footpath, and it was just a footpath. No iron boxes. No tarpaulin sheets. No one crouching. No one haggling. Just concrete, flat and indifferent, as though six decades of a particular kind of Sunday morning had been lifted along with the stalls and taken somewhere I could not see.

I understood something that morning that I had known intellectually but not yet felt, that how fragile and contingent this world was. How much it depended on permissions and invisibilities, on the stubbornness and resilience of people who showed up every Sunday and arranged their books and waited. That day shaped this book more than any other.

Do you think this bazaar will continue to thrive/survive given the online market of books? Please elaborate.

The bazaar has already survived things more threatening than the online market. It has survived displacement orders, pandemic lockdowns, municipal raids, and sixty years of operating without official sanction. The online market is a pressure, but it is not a new kind of pressure.

What the online market cannot replicate is serendipity. You cannot search for a book you do not know exists. You cannot stumble upon a 1978 Penguin edition with someone else’s marginalia on an algorithm. You cannot haggle, or sit on the vendor’s side of the stall and hear a story that changes how you read. The shauqeen will keep coming for precisely these reasons. The students will keep coming because the price point remains unbeatable. The families will keep coming because it is still, on a Sunday morning in Old Delhi, one of the most alive places in the city.

The question is not whether the bazaar will survive but what form it will take. It has always been good at taking new forms — from the footpaths of Jama Masjid to the stretch between Golcha and Delite to Mahila Haat. Each relocation changes something and preserves something. That capacity for reinvention, for showing up in a new place with the same iron boxes and the same stubbornness, is what I mean when I call this a story of resilience. The bazaar has never needed the formal economy’s permission to exist. It is unlikely to start now.

Thank you for your fabulous book and wonderful answers.

[1] The Pavement Book Bazaar

[2] connoisseur

[3] Ironically, translates to ‘Women’s Bazaar’ in Hindi

 (This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)

.

Click here to read an excerpt from Sunday Book Bazaar

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Interview Review

Aruna Chakravarti Converses about her Ghost Stories

An introduction to Aruna Chakravarti’s Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories, published by Penguin India, along with a discussion with the author.

Ghosts are evocative of a past… of history one could say. Then who could be a better storyteller of the past than an author steeped in colours of historical fiction — Aruna Chakravarti! In the past she not only translated novels set in colonial India but evoked the Bengal Renaissance to perfection in her two Jorasanko novels and details of a court hearing in her retelling of the Bhawal prince! This time the diva of historical fiction brings to us a book of spine chilling, ghost stories, Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories.  It is her third collection of short stories.

Aruna Chakravarti
Published in 2026

The narratives are so vivid and visual that they could be worthy of being made into films. They are distinctive in that she has mostly created her own very horrific ghouls – not the traditional ones. They pop up and frighten the reader with their bizarreness and terrifying presences which linger even when you try to sleep at night! She has given us thirteen stories — a spooky number in itself — spread across multiple communities in Asia.

Some of the narratives evoke the past, starting from the 1800s. ‘The House of Flowers’ is set in China partly and partly in Kolkata, where there is now a thriving Chinatown known as “Tangra” and a Kali temple that serves ‘noodles’ as its prasad or offering. The story has echoes of Pearl S Buck’s China interestingly. What comes as a surprise is the fluency with which she has woven in the influences that impact a community of migrants!  

Chakravarti has used her skills as a writer of historical fiction in some of the stories like, ‘The Road to Karimganj’, in which a spook takes us back to undivided Bengal, when passports were not needed as in the story of the migrant Chinese. Hovering around history are more narratives like ‘Possessed’, where a courtesan who performs with the legendary Girish Ghosh1 of the nineteenth century Kolkata undergoes, along with the audience, a strange spooky experience!

Traveling down the century, closer to our times, is the story that is perhaps one of the most bizarre and yet most relatable, ‘The Necklace’. Set in the Anglo-Indian community and the glamour of Park Street — where Wiccan writer, Rajorshi Patranabis, claimed to have met a colonial ghost awaiting her lover — Chakravarti’s narrative is of black magic and betrayal. The fiction is far more impactful and frightening than the factual narrative, which too was spine chilling! You realise what makes fiction so much more gripping than facts — anything can happen in fiction. Chakravarti is imaginative enough to make it as creepy and shadowy as any regular horror writer!

Holding on to that thought, the author holds the key to our experiences as she skillfully outlines two demons grown out of poverty in ‘A Winter Night’. The conclusion has a sense of irony and tragedy. ‘Truth is stranger than Fiction’ weaves in more of the diversity in the historic annals of Bengal. The story that starts the book, ‘The Caregivers of Gazipur’, has an unresolved ending, like some of her other narratives. Though there is a frightful resolution in ‘They Come Out After Dark’. The ghosts play spine chilling havoc with fears of the living while recalling the senseless violence of 1947. ‘There are More Things in Heaven and Earth’…takes us back to the atrocities committed during the Sikh riots of 1984 in Delhi. The mingling of fact and fiction to create weird a fantastical narrative is addressed during a conversation on the supernatural. And there is an exploration of the lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which probably is a touch of the academic as Chakravarti had a long tenure as the principal of a girl’s college in Delhi. It also defines the authorial stance in this story:

‘Don’t forget what Hamlet said to Horatio? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

What is unusual about these stories is the way she has created fictitious geographies and personas, evoking historic realities. They seem perfectly authentic to the reader, including the one set in China. There is a vast mingling of facts and fiction in these stories all to lead to spine-chilling ends with strange twists. 

‘Grandmother’s Bundle’ stands out in its rendition as the ghosts given out are part of the mythical lore of Bengal — stories that were related to most Bengali kids of the twentieth century. They have a touch of humour and dry wit, perhaps introducing a sense of comic relief among very dark and horrific stories that transport us into different worlds.

‘The Motorcycle Rider’, set in modern times, takes us into a university campus to shock us with horrific spooks born out of tragic deaths, while ‘Twenty-nine Years, Seven Months and Eleven Days’, merges a modern outlook with an unfathomable past, touching upon strange tantric yearnings. ‘Vendetta’ twirls nature and supernatural to give a frightening narrative of how nature takes its revenge… a theme that reiterates in writings addressing our current concerns with climate change.

The ease and fluidity with which she has switched from history and realism to horror and fantasy is amazing. Let’s find out more from her about this new persona that inhabits her writerly self…                                                           

Till now we have had translations, numerous novels—many of which can be called historical fiction—and realistic short stories with their base in history or contemporary life. What made you think of writing ghost stories?

After writing The Mendicant Prince which involved extensive research into the life and times of Prince Ramendranarayan Roy of Bhawal, I didn’t feel up to writing a historical novel again. The work had demanded delving into sociological texts, court records, letters, insurance papers and medical reports. Apart from research, historical fiction also demands a certain amount of field work.

Published in 2013
Published in 2016

Before writing the Jorasanko novels I visited the Tagore mansion thrice and while writing The Mendicant Prince, I went to Bangladesh to see the royal palace in Bhawal, renamed Gazipur. Though it has been totally neglected, with shopkeepers and squatters having overtaken most of the area, I was able to get some idea of the topography of the palace and its grounds. I saw the lake and the temple (which was locked) and was able to visualise where the halls and galleries and the apartments of the queens and princesses would have stood. All this work was exhausting. So, for a change, I decided to try my hand at short stories which emerge straight from the imagination. And while at it, I decided to break out of the mould of “historical fiction” writer in which I had trapped myself and try a completely new genre.

Published in 2022

I wrote the first one on an impulse and found myself quite enjoying the process. I didn’t even think of publishing at that time. The first story led to another and another. When eleven stories had been written I sent the manuscript to three publishers and was surprised when all three accepted it. It was then that I found out that ghost stories were the in-thing. That they were selling well and that publishers were looking out for them. I signed up with Penguin as you know. At one point my editor Moutushi Mukherjee suggested I write another two. Thirteen stories will make it even more spooky, she said.  So, I wrote another two.

Would you list these stories as fantasies or fantastical? Or are they stories of personal experience? Please elaborate.

No. They are not born out personal experience. I must confess that I have never seen a ghost in my life. I believe in sixth sense. As a matter of fact, I have acted on my sixth sense on occasions. I have had sudden impulses to do certain things and realised later that if I hadn’t yielded to the impulses, I would have regretted it. But I have had no brush with the supernatural. These stories were sparked off by sudden memories. Something I had read somewhere. Something somebody had told me years ago. A face I had seen in childhood which had stuck in my mind though whose I don’t remember. A conversation overheard which made no sense at the time but which, as an adult, seemed ridden with sinister nuances. A phrase from a book whose title and author’s name I had forgotten. In fact, I didn’t even remember the context from where the phrase had come.

Sudden flashes such as these triggered off the stories. But in the writing, they took on a life and soul of their own. I even feel, sometimes, that the pen took over and they were written by an invisible hand.

Your stories are set, sometimes in real landscapes and sometimes in fictional ones. What kind of research went into creating them? How do you make them so vivid and real?

There wasn’t any immediate research.  I needed to look up a few facts, now and then, mostly to be sure of their authenticity. But nothing truly back breaking. The landscapes, both physical and of the mind, were culled from my travels and my reading of both English and Bengali writers over the eight decades of my life. Much of it stayed with me tucked away in some unconscious part of the mind. Although I write in English, you will notice that almost all the stories are about Bengalis. Bengalis living in Delhi, Kolkata, Bihar and the small towns and villages of Bengal. There are Anglo-Indians, Punjabis and Chinese, too among my characters. But having lived in Bengal for generations, they have adopted Bengali customs and a quasi-Bengali way of living.  Many of the locales in which, they appear are fictional…gathered from my reading and observation of people from different strands of Bengali life.

You have a story set in China which also has the Chinatown of Kolkata in it. Have you been to China? What was the reason for the choice? Were you influenced by any Chinese writers? How did you visualise the Chinese migrants in Kolkata?

Yes, I have been to China. I visited the cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing in 2004. Naturally, I have no personal experience of life as it was lived in the late 18th century which is the period covered in the story ‘The House of Flowers’. For this I had to rely totally on my reading of English authors writing about China like Pearl Buck and Amy Tan. Pearl Buck was a great influence on me while writing this story. It was from her books that I was able to catch the ambience of tea houses and brothels of the period. In depicting the Chinese family who lived in Calcutta in the early 20th century I had to rely on childhood experience, I knew some Chinese girls who had lived for several generations in Calcutta. And my imagination went into full play, of course.

In ‘Grandmother’s Bundle’ you have written about spooks from Bengal. It departs from your other stories in as much as it does not really introduce the supernatural except as a source of folklore. Do you feel it blends with the other narratives in your collection?

Well. It is different from my other stories in certain ways. Firstly, it is three stories rolled into one. Secondly, unlike the others, they are children’s stories. Thirdly, it is the only one that deals with ghosts and other supernatural beings with humour. Lastly, they have been drawn from folklore. I agree that it doesn’t quite blend with the others in this collection. But it is also true that each story in this collection is different from another. There are different time spans. Different locales. Different themes. Characters from different levels of society. That being the case, I think that this story lends variety and another flavour to the collection.

Your stories aren’t like the usual ghost stories one reads. The structure and content seem different. Your comments.

You are right. These stories do not belong to the gothic/horror genre. They are not about vampires, blood sucking bats, severed heads or violence heaped on violence. They are essentially human-interest stories with a supernatural twist at the end. I have taken my cue, you may say, from Coleridge’s demand for a willing suspension of disbelief  before reading his poetry. These stories have innocuous beginnings. Two friends sharing an apartment, a boy walking from his village to an unseen destination, a dinner party in an exclusive area of the capital, a marital spat or a telephone call at dawn. Then, a few paragraphs later a subtle hint is dropped startling  the reader into a realisation that it is not a simple story of human relationships. That it is headed in another, more sinister direction. Another hint is dropped and another. Then in the final sentence the bomb bursts. The last line is the most important line of the story. 

Which is your favourite story? And why?

Just as a mother loves all her children, I love all my stories. But mothers also have favourites and so do I. “The House of Flowers,” “Vendetta,” “Possessed” and “The Necklace” are my favourites. That’s because their themes are unusual and posed a greater challenge. And, perhaps, because I had to work harder on them than on the others.

Are you planning any new books? Exploring any new genres? Any new book we can expect soon?

I always think of a new book even when I am writing the current one. Yes, I am planning to explore yet another genre of writing. But my ideas are nebulous at the moment. Still in a fluid state That being the case I cannot share them with you. All I can say is that the work will be a challenging one and I’m not even sure I’ll be able to see it through. So, we must both wait for some more time

  1. Girish Ghosh (1844-1912) Actor and Director from Bengal ↩︎

 (This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)

.

Click here to read an excerpt from Creeping Shadows.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Excerpt

The House of Flowers by Aruna Chakravarti

Title: Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories

Author: Aruna Chakravarti

Publisher: Penguin India

The House of Flowers

Zihan stirred in his sleep. A chill breath passing over his limbs had awakened him. He strained his eyes, still heavy with wine fumes, and looked around. Where was he? This was not his room and this wasn’t his bed. He was lying in what seemed to be a small, confined space under an ornate gilded ceiling in a bed so soft, his limbs were sinking into its depths. The sky was paling with first light and long beams from a dying moon streamed in through the open window. The fragrance of an unknown flower, wild and sweet, filled the room. 

He turned his head towards the window. Something, like an opalescent haze, was obscuring his vision. At first, he thought it was a sheet of mist. Then, before his amazed eyes, it started to take a shape and form. It became a woman. He could see her slender limbs, smooth as white satin, shimmering through the garment that swayed and billowed around her form. Diaphanous as a film of gossamer. So light, it seemed woven out of moonbeams. Her face was swathed in mist.

The figure moved from the window and came gliding towards him. He could see her face clearly now. A perfect oval with apricot shaped eyes, brows like strung bows and hair that fell down her back like a sheet of black silk. He stared at the vision of loveliness so long and hard …his eyes began to hurt. He had never seen such beauty in a woman before.

She stood by his bed for a while gazing into his eyes, then lay down, her body light as a feather against his. Taking his face in her hands, she caressed it with a tenderness that reminded him of his mother’s touch. She drew the silky strands of her floating hair all over his naked body. Across his chest and abdomen, over his genitals, thighs and legs, down to the insteps of his feet. The wildflower scent from her limbs filled his nostrils. Her kisses fluttered on his lips, soft and cold as drifting snow…

The wine, still running in his blood, quivered in his veins. His limbs, untouched by a woman before, heaved luxuriously and his eyes closed in ecstasy. He drifted away…

How long he lay in this state of bliss, he couldn’t tell. It could be minutes. It could be hours. Gradually, an uneasy feeling came over him. Something heavy was pressing against his body. It was squashing his chest and squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He moved aside but the pressure grew in intensity, driving him further and further towards the edge of the bed. And now his heart beat rapidly with an unknown dread. What was happening? Was he still asleep and this a fearful dream? Suddenly his eyes sprang open and what he saw sent currents of ice water rippling down his spine. He felt the hot blood pulsing and pounding in his ears.  A muscle twitched and shuddered in his cheek…

The reed-slim body of the woman beside him had bloated to a colossal size. Her eyes, thin slits in the vast globe of her face, glittered with hate. Her mouth was a deep red gash through which yellow teeth, long and sharp as a panther’s fangs, hung to her chin.

The mountain of flesh was growing larger and larger every moment. It was filling the bed. He would fall over the edge any moment now. A scream gathered in his lungs but froze before it could reach his throat…

Suddenly she sprang on him; her nails sharp as claws ripping the skin off his chest and thighs. Digging her teeth into the soft flesh just below the right shoulder, she bit off a large hunk. Zihan’s eyes were glazed with pain and fear. He stared mesmerized as the monstrous creature rose from the bed and swayed and shuffled towards the opposite wall. She wore a garment of sheer white muslin that swelled and surged like waves about her form. Blood dripped from her slavering mouth and fell on the floor as her great body waddled, like a gorilla’s, from side to side. And now, for the first time, Zihan saw the coffin. It was open… 

Zihan screamed. Shriek after shriek burst from the throat that had been frozen all this while, hit the walls, and sent fearful echoes all through the house. Then, exhausted and half dead from shock and loss of blood, he lay motionless, whimpering like a child.

Kueilan was a light sleeper and the first to hear the cries. They seemed to be coming from the dead girl’s room. Her heart thudded with fear as she rushed to it and flung the door open. She stood where she was for a while, her eyes glued to the coffin. It stood in the same place but the seal was broken and its open lid rested against the wall. A lily-white hand with long tapering fingers was dangling from the edge. And now the lid began to move downwards. Slowly, soundlessly, it was falling in place. In a few moments it would reach the hand and crush it. A tremor ran through Kueilan’s frame. Her mouth opened in a scream but before she could utter a sound, the hand glided over the edge and slipped into the hollow where the rest of the dead girl lay. Then, before Kueilan’s amazed eyes, the coffin closed, the seal came together and all was as it had been.

‘Published with permission from Penguin Random House India from Creeping Shadows (2026)’.

About the Book:

The stories in Creeping Shadows are spread over a vast canvas, both in terms of time span and locale. A teahouse in ancient China. A brothel in nineteenth-century Calcutta. A forest lodge in Bankura. An old mansion in Bangladesh. A university campus in today’s Delhi. Beginning as human-interest narratives, they end with sudden, unexpected twists that raise hair ends and send trickles of ice water down the spine. Here are tales of shadows, tingles and chills…

About the Author:

Aruna Chakravarti has been principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator with eighteen published books on record. They comprise five novels, two books of short stories, two academic works and nine volumes of translation.
Her first novel, The Inheritors (published by Penguin Random House), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and her second, Jorasanko, received critical acclaim and became a bestseller. Daughters of Jorasanko, a sequel to Jorasanko, has sold widely and received rave reviews. Her novel Suralakshmi Villa was adjudged ‘Novel of the year (India 2020)’ by Indian Bibliography published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature U.K. Her other well-known works include The Mendicant Prince which has been shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, and Through a Looking Glass: Stories. Her translated works include an anthology of songs from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitabitaan, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days, First Light and Primal Woman: Stories. Her most recent work is titled Rising from the Dust.
Among the various awards she has received are Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar. She is also a scriptwriter and producer of seven multi-media presentations based on her novels. Comprising dramatized readings, interspersed with songs and accompanied by a visual presentation by professional artists and singers, these programmes have been widely acclaimed and performed in many parts of India and abroad.

Click here to read her interview/review

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Excerpt

Anthill by Vinoy Thomas 

Title: Anthill

Author: Vinoy Thomas

Translator: Nandakumar K

Publisher: Penguin India

Diverse Marriages

The sight of his brother-in-law and his own son toiling in the teashop warmed the cockles of Prasannan’s heart. Whenever Ranjit handed over a cup of tea to anyone, they would say, ‘Oh, Prasannan’s tea was far better.’

He was gladdened not because his son caused people to compare him favourably but because the level of tea and sugar in the containers remained undiminished and one bottle of milk delivered over forty to forty-five cups of tea. Since Perumpadi was devoid of other shops at that time, the public decided to accept— with the same stoicism they accepted fate—the son’s atrocities as he followed in his father’s footsteps.

Suni excelled in tossing parottas and thinning them like cloth; wet grinding the batter to such a fine froth that dosas became gossamers; slicing the bananas paper-thin to make fritters; pouring wheat flour, baking soda and sugar mixtures from such heights that undakkaya made out of it had more air bubbles than substance. His only fault was that he had to watch at least two movies a week. That was taken care of by the complimentary pass he received for pasting the movie poster on the shop wall.

The day after the vehicle of black magic was delivered, work was started on a kuzhikalari* in a plot that belonged to Chandrappura Mani to the west of Prasannan’s land. Whirlwind Manoharan was the kalari gurukkal. There were two versions on the provenance of this nickname—some said that it was because from the time he was a child, at the least provocation he would swirl like a typhoon and hit people; others said it was because he was epileptic. Epilepsy and whirlwind share the same homonym in the vernacular.

Whirlwind Manoharan had a trait of becoming an instant admirer of practitioners of traditional skills and arts—especially the ones he could not master—and then trailing those practitioners to learn from them. Although an ardent admirer, when he started to learn the skill or art, he would pick fights with his gurus. He, therefore, ended up not mastering any of the skills.

Although he tried to learn many such skills, he gave literacy a wide berth. In his view, this world needed nothing that required one to be literate. Before he started the kuzhikalari, he was attached as a helper to a stonemason.

At the house at Koothuparamba where he was working, a kalari asan had come to do therapeutic massage for the karanavar of the house. The way he carried himself and his physique turned Manoharan into a devotee. He started to believe that whatever the asan did was superhuman. One day, after the massage, when the asan was leaving, it started to rain heavily.

‘Asan, how can you leave without an umbrella?’

‘Why do I need an umbrella? I will twirl this stick and walk,’ asan bragged for a lark.

After he said that, when he stepped into the rain, asan did open the umbrella in his hand. However, Manoharan’s mind was not willing to process that sight. All he saw was asan walking under a stick spinning overhead, without a single droplet hitting his body. The apprenticeship with the stonemason ended on the same day.

Manoharan was unable to follow the vocal syllables used by the guru for guiding his disciples’ steps and movements. Though Manoharan had suggested that he slow down the recitation, asans have their own pace of doing such things. Even the small children were stepping up to that tempo. Eventually, asan separated Manoharan from other disciples and let him set his own pace. After about six months, Manoharan made an announcement that shocked asan—he was going to start his own kalari in Perumpadi. Asan asked him, ‘Eda, do you know all the movements?’

‘Oh yeah, I learnt before joining here.’

‘Let’s hear a couple of vocal syllables of the move sequences.’ ‘Eyy, gurukkal, what do you need all these vocal syllables for?

Feet forward, feet back, bend, twist, turn   isn’t it enough to say

these? I know enough.’

‘You little prick, upon all the gods of kalari, I shall not allow you to start the kalari.’ The gurukkal was adamant.

‘Gurukkal, for Perumpadi even I am too good. Shouldn’t they all learn kalari? Shouldn’t I earn my livelihood?’

Considering that any further conversation would be possible only if he lowered his own station as a gurukkal, he said nothing further.

Since Whirlwind was the owner, there was no cutting corners. The ground was excavated and sunk by four feet; the kalari training arena was laid out as per the traditional dimensions of forty-two feet by twenty-one feet; one-and-a-half-feet high mud walls bordering the kalari were built and on that, using bamboos and coconut thatches, the superstructure six-feet high; and in the south-west corner, a seven-level poothara, a platform for the kalari deities.

A few knives, swords, ottas,* and canes were procured and placed on the poothara. These arrangements left Whirlwind’s detractors in awe, and in spite of themselves they started to call him gurukkal. The kalari normally starts during the monsoon season. However, the location being Perumpadi and the gurukkal being Manoharan, it started in April. He managed to enrol about fifteen children as disciples.

With the opening of the kalari, Prasannan started to stock gingelly oil—until then it had no demand—in large quantities. He started to offer ready credit to Manoharan gurukkal. Receiving unwonted respect, gurukkal became a regular at Prasannan’s shop.

Two months after the inauguration of the kalari, a man came to Prasannan’s shop claiming he could stick together anything that was splintered. He was carrying a glue in a spiral, wound up like aluminium wire.

When Prasannan dismissed him with ‘Sticking, my ass, as if there is nothing else to do, scram,’ Manoharan, seated on the plank drinking tea, was immediately interested in the new gimmick and said, ‘Don’t go without showing how you stick things together,’ and made the glue-man sit beside him.

That made Prasannan recall the broken cooking pot lying behind the shop. Happy that at least one loss could be redeemed, he offered, ‘I’ll give a pot to be glued.’ He went to the rear of the shop and lifted the pot. The sight of something wrapped in the torn pall shocked him. Without showing any alarm, he took the bundle, shoved it between the banana plant stem and leaf stalk, and handed over the pot to the glue-man. By that time, using charcoal, the glue man had started an ersatz furnace in a small biscuit tin.

He ground the broken edges and made them smooth and even. Using the rod heated in the ersatz furnace, he applied the aluminium coloured glue on the broken edges and stuck them together. After that, he poured water into the pot; there were no leaks, not even seepage. The man instructed them that the pot should be used on the stove only after three hours. Prasannan paid Rs 25 for a sliver of the glue—the size of a matchstick—planning to use it in future.

After five hours, Radhamani boiled water in that pot to make fish curry. As she added Malabar tamarind and stirred the pot, it started to leak like an incontinent elder onto the stove.

When the fire in the stove was extinguished, Prasannan suddenly recalled the bundle he had found under the pot. He felt no animus towards the glue-man; nor did he believe he had been duped. All he could think was that the black magic was so malevolent that not even a breach in his pot could be repaired.

The next day, Radhamani got a low-grade fever. Before taking Radhamani to the doctor, Prasannan chose to go to a karmi* in Manathana. As he struggled to undo the knots, the karmi said, ‘This is no tyro, it’s done by an expert.’

When he opened and read the palmyra leaves, he understood it was a horoscope. However, the text added by Pittankanishan foxed him. Nevertheless, in order to vindicate his previous opinion, he said, ‘It’s a malefic thing done by including a rakshass’s† horoscope in it. Remedying it will not be easy. But we are lucky that it is not impossible.’

‘Are you able to divine who did it?’

‘They don’t belong to your place. Your enemies are from outside.’

‘Could be true. I don’t have many enemies in our place.

Whatever it maybe, please get rid of the jinx.’

On the prescribed date, for hours after midnight, all the rituals and poojas were conducted. Gritting his teeth, Prasannan had loosened his purse strings.

‘You have nothing to fear any more. Not only have I nullified it, I have built a fence of protection that none can breach,’ the karmi said with overweening self-confidence.

The next day, Prasannan observed all his customers closely; apparently, the tale of the midnight exorcism rituals had not reached them. If it had, there would have been searching questions. However, after he had swept the teashop, he was stunned by a question asked and statement made by Whirlwind, who had come in for a morning tea, ‘Prasanetta, has Radhamani chechi’s fever subsided? Be careful, she could have AIDS. We don’t know what diseases people bring into the shop. She interacts with them closely, doesn’t she?’

Whirlwind had no idea what AIDS was. He thought that it spread like common cold. However, since everyone else present there knew what it was and how it was transmitted, they laughed.

‘Your mother has AIDS.’

Prasannan had regained his confidence from the knowledge that the jinx had been neutralized. That courage made him unleash a roundhouse slap on Manoharan’s face, forgetting for the nonce that he was a kalari gurukkal. Mortified, Manoharan turned and ran into the kalari.

Getting into the lotus position with much difficulty, he sat in front of the poothura for a while, pondering which weapon to use on Prasannan. Finally, he decided that it had to be the otta—not because he was an expert user, but because none of the Perumpadi residents had seen it used before. In order to give them a taste of this weapon shaped like an elephant tusk, he took it up in his hand.

As Prasannan watched Whirlwind run towards him twirling the otta overhead furiously, he felt scared. To temper his fear, he stepped out of the shop and took up a large stone. That sight scared Manoharan too.

Manoharan thought it prudent to remind him the rules of engagement, ‘Prasannetta, you should not fling stones at someone wielding the otta. You may take up an otta yourself.’ However, since Prasannan had not been trained in kalari, he was not bound by such rules.

‘Run, …, I will break your single tusk with this stone,’ said Prasannan, and aimed the stone at Manoharan’s knees. Although Manoharan tried to stop it with the otta, it did hit his leg. Manoharan did not pause for further reflection; he flung the otta towards Prasannan’s head. It hit his right leg, instead.

With the words ‘Prasannetta, didn’t I warn you not to fling stones at an otta-expert?’ Manoharan walked back to the kalari.

Prasannan, whose femur had a complete, transverse fracture, was taken to the hospital by the people who had gathered there by then. After putting the leg in the cast, the doctor informed him that he would not be able to walk for three months.

‘President, he slapped me and also flung a stone at me. Yet I did nothing. However, as a weapon with integrity, the otta did find its target. Hadn’t I warned him enough not to tangle with the otta?’ At Reformation House, standing in front of Jeremias, Manoharan mounted a spirited defence.

Nevertheless, Jeremias decreed that since Manoharan had ignited the fight by slandering Prasannan’s wife and Prasannan’s hospital expenses had stacked up to a princely sum, he should pay Prasannan some compensation. Prasannan not only rejected Manoharan’s appeal for a remission in the compensation—in consideration of his readiness to massage Prasannan’s leg, after the cast was removed, with the kalari’s traditional liniment for such injuries—but also demanded that the outstanding dues, towards teas consumed by him, be settled forthwith.

Normally, when he saw that both parties were digging in their heels or that circumstances could not be ameliorated through dialogues, Jeremias quickly wound up the mediation talks.

The Manoharan-Prasannan dispute was one such. When he was trying to think of a way to end it, Puliyelil Clara reached Reformation House. Jeremias named a figure as compensation that was mutually acceptable to the parties, asked Prasannan to give Manoharan sufficient time to pay him, and brought down the curtain on the issue.

After drinking the tea and eating the jackfruit fries that Kathrina had served, Clara presented her problem.

‘You are aware, President, that my son Robin was working in a gold jewellery shop in Kannur.’

‘Oh yeah, you said that he was paid well and all that.’

‘True, he was paid well. They cared for him too; he was well regarded. He was managing everything in the shop. They are some kind of brahmins, yet, he was invited to every function at their home. I too have been to their house a couple of times. His boss has two daughters. He has fallen in love with the older one, a college student. I swear upon the Holy Mother, I had no inkling of this. I wouldn’t allow him to marry from another religion. What to say, president, last Saturday night he turned up with that girl in tow. I asked him what kind of idiotic act he had done and scolded him harshly.

‘The girl then started to cry saying she can’t live without him. To be honest, when I saw her cry like that, I too felt bad. So, I decided to let them stay with me that night. Robin said they would sleep together. I put my foot down. After she had been baptised and they were married they could sleep together or wake up together or whatever. President, shouldn’t we abide by the Church’s dictates? The same night, I went up the valley and made the girl stay in my sister’s home there.

‘The next morning, I found her father and relatives standing in my front yard. I started to tremble with fear. My son was also nervous. However, her father only asked him where his daughter was, and nothing else. I went and fetched the girl. The moment she saw her father, she started to weep. After asking her not to cry, her father spoke to us. Everyone already knew she had eloped. She was not going to find another alliance. They were agreeable to them getting married. I said, it’s true that we are surviving because of his salary. However, that doesn’t mean I am going to let him marry out of religion. She has to accept all our sacraments and get married in the church. He said all conditions were acceptable. It’s the first wedding in the family, he said, and that they wanted it conducted with pomp in a wedding hall. And the mangalasutra ceremony could be in some nearby church. I agreed to all that.

‘Then they said, there should be some assurance from our side. At least rings should be exchanged, then and there. We had no stock of rings at home, I said. They said that was of no matter, they’d brought the rings, and that could be deducted from the dowry. A solid ring, at least one-and-a-half sovereigns, she slipped onto Robin’s finger. He slipped another one on to her finger too. After fixing a tentative date for the wedding, they went away, taking her with them. Yesterday, Monday, when Robin went for work, the manager said he should meet the owner first. He says when he met the owner, he was not the same person he was on Sunday. The man abused him roundly and threatened that if showed up again, he would file a complaint that he had stolen the ring. He’s back home and in tears. What should I do, president?’

Jeremias kept looking at Clara as he turned things over in his mind. He then spoke, while pondering over the loss Robin had suffered.

‘Clara, every man is fated to get a particular woman. That’s whom he’ll get. Now you think about it. If this marriage had happened, what would have been your state? Would she have been a help to you? Do you think she would have stayed in this place, especially in your home? Whatever you might say, whether you consider our faith, economic status, domestic circumstances, place, or culture, only alliances that are suitable for us will sustain. If you can get Robin to meet me, I shall try to talk to him. Money, prestige, nothing matters; compatibility is the foundation of family life. We shall find such a girl for him.’

As he was ending his words, Jeremias’s mind was filled with another thought. Robin and his son Arun were of the same age. Now he too was of marriageable age; Jeremias had not been thinking of it only because Arun was away. Kathrina was concerned; she used to voice it occasionally.

‘Son, you should take care. You care for the people here; but no one will be there for you. Ours is a truncated family. A cursed family, as your father used to say. It’s been said that it will affect seven generations. We can only pray that nothing of that sort happens. However, you need to take care of Arun. He is living alone, far away from all of us, in an alien land. He has not seen a settled, happy family life. All my prayers to God are for him to have a happy family life.’

Only when his mother used to say such things would Jeremias think of his son. Was there really the curse that his father used to talk about? If indeed it were there, would prayers alone nullify it? Living as a family unit has to be learnt from doing so. Arun never had the opportunity. He should not have been sent away for his studies. Nevertheless, Jeremias could not have insisted that Arun should spend his life in this accursed Perumpadi like his previous generations. Jeremias was aware that he himself did not have an ideal family life to exemplify for Arun’s benefit. There was no point in agonizing over it. If it was in his fate to be married, he would find a bride too, as any other young man.

While returning after discussing the case of Charapadam Monichan’s daughter, Jeremias told Velu what had occurred to him, ‘Velu, kalyanam, that is wedding, means good or happy times. But, is it really that way? What have we seen in the majority of the houses in Perumpadi—complaints, disunity, tears, laments and suffering, right? If we search for the root cause, in most cases, we end up at incompatible marriages. Did Monichanchettan really have to get his mentally disturbed daughter married?’

Mental illness ran in the Charapadam family. It made finding her a suitable alliance difficult. Monichan tried his best to get her into a convent. However, the nuns in charge rejected her candidacy when they came to know of her mental illness. At that time, a proposal came from a family in Edathotty who had recently migrated to Malabar. No one knew of their provenance. Not that the Charapadam family were keen to find out about their roots.

The wedding did go through. On the first night, the girl bit off the groom’s ear. The issue eventually reached Jeremias. During the compromise talks, Jeremias said, ‘Return the gold and the almirah that you had received as dowry and drop her back home. And file a divorce petition.’

This statement put the boy’s parish priest’s back up. ‘How can that be? Whom God has joined, let no man put asunder. You should let the girl live with you. We can send her for some divine retreat. We have now retreat centres that cure things worse than this.’

After she returned from the retreat, the next organ that she chose to chew up was dearer and more useful to the husband than his ear. When the boy’s party reached Monichan’s house, Monichan told Jeremias, ‘I shall handle this now, president. You had given him a way out, hadn’t you?’

Jeremias remained silent. Taking his silence for acquiescence, Monichan filed a case against the boy, his sister and his father, alleging sexual assault. The complaint stated that the boy had affairs with other women and had attempted to murder Monichan’s daughter so that he could marry another woman. The police arrested the whole family and bundled them into the lock-up.

On that occasion, the vicar said, ‘That is not God’s law; it’s the land’s law. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’

As soon as the boy’s family was released from the jail, at the first opportunity, they sold their property in Edathotty and left for some unknown destination.

‘We call that most disastrous event of that boy’s life also kalyanam. God’s laws and man’s laws are together screwing our lives.’ Jeremias concluded the topic he had opened with Velu.

Months later, an example substantiating Jeremias’s view that marriages happen unplanned did show up in Perumpadi. Following Prasannan’s leg fracture, Suni had assumed part control of the teashop. That pleased Ranjit too. Prasannan had said he would maintain the cashbox. However, insisting that his brother-in-law should take complete rest, Suni arranged all amenities for him in the bedroom behind the teashop. Every evening he showed him the account books too.

‘He’s smart. He’ll manage everything well.’ Radhamani gave her testimonial on behalf of her brother. Suni started the practice of closing the shop on Sunday afternoons. Every Sunday, as soon as they closed the shop, Ranjit and Suni headed for the movie theatre. They would return late in the night. One Sunday, they left for the movies and were not back even the next morning. Radhamani had to open the shop and serve tea. Prasannan let out a string of invectives and, aided by a stick, limped his way to the table that served as the cash counter. In the afternoon, Suni and Ranjit arrived in a taxi. A girl was with them.

‘Aiyyo, isn’t this Appam Mary’s daughter?’ The words of a customer seated inside the shop could be heard outside.

‘Yes, it is, sonny, do you have any doubts?’ the girl turned on him.

‘A slight one. That’s now removed.’ He retreated.

‘What’s all this shouting in front of the shop?’ Leaning on the stick, as soon as Prasannan stood up with these words, the girl bowed down towards his broken leg saying, ‘Acha, bless me.’

‘You misbegotten…, what is all this?’ Prasannan directed his query at his son.

‘Father, I was suckered.’

Those few words from an overwrought Ranjit were the précis of the story that spread through Perumpadi thereafter. After the advent of Suni at the shop, uncle and son used to sleep on the same mat, and uncle used to narrate titillating stories to his nephew to put him to sleep.

Stories such as squeezing lemon juice over a woman’s private parts to check if she had sexually transmitted disease when she was his and his friends’ co-passenger on a truck on their hitchhiking trip to Bangalore; gifting a piece of jaggery to suck on and a children’s magazine to read to seduce young girls in the slums; during visits to a relative’s house in the Wayanad hills, since the neighbourhood’s only wet-grinding stone was in that home, how he took the friendly neighbourhood women who were using the grinding stone from behind, and with his rhythmic thrusts helped them grind everything to a fine paste. Inspired by those stories, Ranjit requested for an opportunity to be the character in such a story so that he could gloat among his friends. Suni said that if there was money such stories wrote themselves.

All Ranjit had to do was dip his sticky fingers in the shop’s cash-box. The rest—finding the girl, vehicle, place, everything— fell on Suni. Every Sunday their purported visits to the cinema were to create stories for Ranjit to narrate in his old age.

Suni was late in realizing that Appam Mary’s daughter, Preetha, had started earning independently. In Suni’s opinion, it was all for the good, for in the initial days her rates would be sky-high. That Sunday with her in the car, they had used the Periya Pass to enter Wayanad. At the twenty-eighth milestone, they were stopped for a police check.

‘They’re my nephew and niece. We are going to Thirunelli temple to worship.’

Preetha, seated in the rear of the car with Ranjit, did some quick thinking. She had started to hate her present life. She thought of her mother, who with no one to help her, was forced to push her too into the profession. Why should she not have a family life? To have that one needs to marry a loaded guy. In her present circumstances, that was a distant dream. This was a do-or- die situation, where the right decision could make her life.

‘Sir, that’s not true. Ranjitettan took me from my home promising to marry me. I came because he assured me this uncle seated in front too was aware of it. We are Christians, sir. I won’t be allowed into my home now.’

‘Aiyyo, I never promised to marry her, sir,’ Ranjit blurted out. ‘Then what did you promise to do, man?’ the policeman pulled open the door and demanded.

The police accompanied them to Thirunelli. The brilliant idea that there was no need to inform his folks and that later they could get rid of her by offering her some money was that of Suni. With his uncle as witness, Ranjit signed an undertaking in the police station that he would marry Preetha and take care of her. The police, on their part, gave their word to Preetha that if it did not happen, they would file charges against Ranjit for sexual harassment.

After mouthing a volley of the choicest abuses at his daughter- in-law prostrated now at his feet, Prasannan hobbled into his house. When he pondered over it at leisure, he realized no one among them was to be blamed for all that had happened. It was the black magic at its malevolent best. Who is a more powerful shaman than the one in Manathana? Or perhaps, what was happening in his family was beyond the powers of any shaman.

The next morning, Prasannan woke up at 3 a.m., as was his wont. Everyone else was asleep. Leaning on the stick, he walked around the shop that his father had started and he himself had nurtured without rest for four decades.

From an open sack, rice grains were on the verge of falling down. He rolled up the hem of the sack and turned it into a ridge to hedge in the grains. He picked up a potato that had rolled off another sack and put it back. He selected chillies that had started to rot and threw them into the bin meant for cattle feed. He closed firmly the sliding door of the almirah in which savouries were kept. He looked towards the room in which his son and his bride were sleeping. He then went out and started to walk as fast as his broken leg could carry him to a destination he himself did not know.

About the Book

Anthill centres around the people of Perumpadi, a remote village that has hidden itself from the world. Bounded by dense Kodagu forests on the south and west, and rivers on the north and east, and situated at the border between Kerala and Karnataka, Perumpadi’s very isolation attracted varied settlers from south Kerala over the years. The first settler on this land, Kunjuvarkey, was fleeing the opprobrium of getting his own daughter pregnant. Those who followed had similar shameful secrets. In a land of sinners, where no one pried into the other’s past, they were able to live and build a community without being tied down by society’s interdictions. Anthill, the exquisite translation of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi-winning novel Puttu, tells the story of a people who have tried to shed the shackles of family, religion and other restraining institutions, but eventually also struggle to conform to the needs of a cultured society. .

About the Author and Translator

Vinoy Thomas hails from Nellikkampoyil, Iritty, in north Kerala. A school teacher by profession, he is one of the most promising young writers in Malayalam. His short story collections include Ramachi, Mullaranjanam and Adiyormisiha Enna Novel. His maiden novel, Karikkottakkary (English translation soon to be published by Penguin Random House), was selected as one of the best five novels in the DC Books competition. His second novel, Puttu (Anthill), won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award for the Best Malayalam Novel of 2021. In 2019, Ramachi had won the same award for short stories. Vinoy has also authored a children’s book, Anatham Piriyatham. His short stories have been made into movies. He is also a gifted scriptwriter and has to his credit a few acclaimed movies.

Nandakumar K is a Dubai based translator.His co-translation of M. Mukundan’s  Delhi Ghadaka(Delhi: A Soliloquy) won the 2021 JCB Prize for literature. His other translations include A Thousand Cuts, the autobiography of T.J. Joseph, which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award; The Lesbian Cow and other Stories by Indu Menon; and In the Name of the Lord, the autobiography of  Sr Lucy Kalapura. Nandakumar is the grandson of Mahakavi Vallathol Narayana Menon.

* Where kalaripayattu, Kerala’s martial arts, is taught in the traditional manner.

* A thick, curved truncheon made of wood used in kalaripayattu.

* Shaman.

† A rakshass (short for Brahmarakshass) is an evil spirit that is born when a brahmin is murdered.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

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