Word Count: 823 | Reading Time: 3 min
Dear Reader,
I often wonder what stories can do for us, in a world beset with genocides and pandemics, on the verge of irreversible ecological collapse. If the cozy escapism offered in the reams of fiction is an affront to the unimaginable lived realities experienced by so many of us, often undocumented, in various unfortunate corners of the globe. Yet humankind has always turned to art—to understand, to empathize, to imagine perspectives and personhoods vastly different from one’s own.
Stories will always matter—but who gets to tell these stories? And for whom?
In the wake of generative AI, fascism and global disasters engineered by the agents of corporate capitalism, certain fundamentalist narratives hold sway, while others get smothered under the rubble. Myths are co-opted or distorted to rewrite histories and serve ethnonationalist agendas; books and art objects are burned or destroyed to erase the past; populations deemed ‘dangerous’ are unlawfully silenced, rendered stateless, habitually disappeared without a trace.
Not all stories are created equal.
Perhaps then, it is the need of the hour, to create shelters for the stories without homes. For the stories of our grandmothers and our ghosts, lost to memory and time. For the stories we’ve read in secret, furtively passed around or discussed in whispers, lest we be overheard by the wrong ears. For the stories of all those who vanished yet hide in our hearts still. Stories about desires and hopes and dreams we’re too afraid to confront—and so we drive them away into a liminal shadow realm of fancy and fairytale. A mirror portal into our collective unconscious. A pocket dimension for the speculative, for the horrific, for the sublime.
This edition of Tasavvur aims to be a home for some such stories, tinged with bitterness and grief, muffled responses to injustices too great for a solitary soul to stand against. These stories invite you to sit with the discomfort and devastation, with the sadness that has no other place to go, with conflicting feelings that cannot resolve into any sense of closure. It’s these dissonances that alert us to the fact that there’s something terribly wrong with the world we inhabit—and not enough of us are doing something to fix it.
Rajiv Mote’s “The Kraken Waketh” that unfolds aboard a cruise ship, tells the bittersweet story of an old married couple painfully aware that their time together is drawing to a close, as is the likely end to humankind, with the dire warnings of climate change unheeded, as symbolized by the momentary glimpse of the corpse of a colossal creature floating on the ocean’s surface whose significance most passengers simply do not comprehend.
In “Mother, Do Not Grieve” Tunvey Mou pens a harrowing story of child-trafficking and abuse, drawing upon religious cults and immolation practices like sati. And yet the tale ends on a slight sliver of hope, reminding the reader that escape from oppressive institutions though not impossible isn’t without consequence.
“The Curse of Kala Sagar” by Shobhita Narayan takes place in a whimsy secondary fantasy world, populated by chudails and yakhinis, and beset by curses of every kind. It narrates the unlikely friendship that blossoms between the town’s savior and a powerful chudail, and the forces from beyond that threaten their alliance and the town’s uneasy peace.
“The Fig Tree” is a complex meditation on grief, isolation and cultural identity, taken from Puloma Ghosh’s debut short story collection, Mouth. The story is set in my hometown of Kolkata, capturing the changing contours of the city with lyrical elegance, from the perspective of a daughter settled abroad visiting the city after her mother’s death—and haunted by her ghost in almost every corner and crevice.
Finally, Indrapramit Das’s horror tale “Here Comes Your Man” originally appeared in the bone-chilling anthology, Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow. It details an unmarried couple’s weekend trip to Shantiniketan gone nightmarishly wrong, caught in the crossfire of toxic masculinity, patriarchal expectations, and trauma cocktails. It’s one that I’m sure will powerfully resonate with survivors of sexual assault, haunting the reader long after the last line.
On the non-fiction front, we have an exciting and informative article on Punjabi science fiction by Dr. Devinder Pal Singh, and a comprehensive round-up of speculative fiction by South Asian authors published in the last quarter by Ayesha Channa. Many of these titles don’t quite get the mainstream attention and success they deserve, yet their stories are no less valuable—waiting to take the readers on a spellbinding journey if they’re only given a chance.
I hope that in these dark tales, you may find some illumination—some truth or feeling that you can carry forward within you.
I invite you, dear reader, to peruse these stories and closely listen.
—Archita Mittra