Prasad swivels his head to watch a dragonfly that is moving too fast to allow him to fix its colour in his head. It is dazzling blue, but a moment later, transparent silver. The September sun is beating down on the heads of the forty-two boys and nineteen girls of KP Kattimani High School. A […]

How does one know a man for what he truly is? How does one recognize his real virtues? Who is it who can? Who really knows? And even if one knows, how does one know for certain? Because of this uncertainty, in our country it is the robes of the man which are worshipped, not […]

और अंत में… गल्पकार होना चाहते तुम सभी किरदार थे. किरदार होना चाहते तुम सभी गल्पकार थे. सूत्रधार भी. लेकिन उससे पहले, उस अष्टकोणीय ऑक्टोपसनुमा हरे हॉल में, जिसकी लाल चकत्तेदार दीवारों पर पुतली-रहित पीली ऑंखों वाली नीली मछलियों की तस्वीरें लगीं थीं, श्वानमुद्रा में नृत्यरत लंबू अफगानी के पिछवाड़े सटकर खड़ी बेमौसम बकरिया को […]

Outside the hut, father and son sat before the dying embers in silence. Inside, the son’s young wife, Budhiya, was thrashing about in labor. Every now and then, a blood-curdling shriek emerged from her mouth and they felt their hearts stop. It was a winter night, the earth was sunk in silence and the whole […]

It was the third time I’d met him, but it felt like the first.  I’d gone twice before to Saud’s to find  him, but both times I was so tired from running around all day that I fell asleep before he got back.  The next day I waited around, but when he still wasn’t up […]

Translator’s Note Saer’s “Glosa” — to be published this fall by Open Letter as “The Sixty-Five Years of Washington” — was first published in 1985, in the middle of what would become a thirty-year exile in France. It recalls an Argentina of twenty-five years previous, before guerrilla terrorism and millitary repression overwhelmed the country. But […]

This is night where lovers, gods and travelers walk without a lantern. A luminescence separates the clear ground from the tree trunks, the trunks from their leaves, the leaves from the sky. The foreground of the forest is shadowed, but over there, beyond the trees, the land curves in an arc like a horizon, and […]

So. Tuesday, again. Ajay had tried hard to wake up at five, thinking (how optimistic was this?) that he’d go for a run. But when the phone alarm, an annoying tinny version of Für Elise, went off, he’d hit the snooze button. Now, at exactly ten to six, the phone rang again. His right knee […]

Neelakantan had taken 41 days off from his beloved. Just a vow. It was when their affair had crossed the 90-day mark that he had felt the need for a break. The romance that was born one night when they rammed into each other trying to take the same auto rickshaw, had become a success […]

1. Playboy A Playboy was hidden behind her jaw, rolled and bent like she had stashed it there in a hurry. Black and white alarm clocks were pasted over the women’s breasts and the words ‘!wUt aLarming bOobeez!’ were scrawled across the stomachs. It was hard to tell if she had done this herself or […]