With the enormous eye as a reference point, they could resolve the shape’s features: a fin, a long barrel of mantle, a splay of serpentine arms. As the crowds milled and jostled for a view, the Doctors Sen watched the creature’s vast form fade to the ghostly white of cephalopod senescence. A cephalopod of an order that had already used up superlative names—giant, colossal—without anticipating how much size remained to classify. Only legend and myth could provide a name.
“Scrawny,” she says, prodding her this way and that, pinching her ribs, sparse as sitar strings. “Far too scrawny. But your hair,” the Grieving Mother touches the end of her braid, long and dark, the last remnant of her mother. She shies away, afraid the Grieving Mother might chop it all away. But the Grieving Mother only shakes her head, drawing the ends of her white odhni over her bald head. “Well. I can do something with that.”
Her grandmother’s house tugs at her. She doesn’t know if it’s nostalgia or a way of missing her mother and even her grandmother. Ankita longs for familiar skin, the sheen of sweat behind their ears, hair glistening with sweet hibiscus oil. The heat-and-lotion smell she’s grasped for all her life.
It is a Friday again and the citizens of Kala Sagar have gathered for the local Kavi Sammelan, the Festival of Bards. The townspeople chime in with their own stories, lore passed by time that has been picked up by the wind. Curses are everywhere, they proclaim loudly: in cotton-eyed flowers that lull kids into drowning, in false moonlight that conjure images and lead one to waste away, and in shoes that can swallow someone’s whole being.
The phone is in her hands. She doesn’t want to switch it on for fear of this coffin-like space keeping her safe and trapped, she doesn’t want to see Aditya’s face in that pale blue glow, the blood marking out a crimson grin in a ghost mask, she doesn’t want to see that he’s not Aditya at all, but something else, that ancient god behind dead eyes, animated by the rutting of horrible men from across time.
Speculative short stories, novellas and books, published by South Asian authors, from October to December 2024
Emerging in the 1970s, Punjabi science fiction (SF) is a relatively young addition to the genre’s global history. Over the past five decades, the field has seen sporadic yet noteworthy
contributions, blending original works and translations to enrich Punjabi literature.