Word Count: 1854 | Reading Time: 7 min
Monsoon has finally arrived in my city but as has become norm these last few years, the appearance is tingled with both, joy and fear. The former is old—a long album of blurred happy childhood games and nostalgic celebrations—the latter newer, and more viscerally felt. For the rains no longer just bring glad tidings for this region, they also carry with them the terrible memories of recent disasters and the never-ending threat of their amplified reoccurrence. Climate change hence, devastates both, life and imagination.
Surprisingly—or perhaps not?—the stories we have for you today also deal with similar mad-made issues. There’re methodical guides on repression, an intimate outlook of humanity from nature’s perspective, a delightful garden oasis that’s a capitalist prison for some, a devastating account of a war zone, and a women’s obsessive spiral due to a bug infestation. The five tales, one each from Apex, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Nightmare, respectively, were all published in the second quarter of this year, April to June, 2025.
Without further ado, let us begin.
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To Kill A Language by Rukman Ragas – Apex, Issue # 149
“To kill a language, you must first rip it from living throats.”
If ever there was a manual on the slow, methodical murder of language, this would be it. Structured like a DIY step-by-step guide, the flash sets the mood from the first line, the ruthless cruelty of the measures amplified by the rather pragmatic tone.
Ragas’s choice to write this in second person finds its true mark by the third sentence, whereby the narrator and reader are made to be a part of the same team. As one reads forward, the knowledge that this is a violence inherited—sold and advertised as necessary, even essential—settles in alongside the guilt. Both are heavy and inescapable throughout.
“The ancestral memories are adamant; one can’t kill what’s already dead, so take away comprehension.”
By approaching language and its widespread influences as both, concept and reality, the flash breezes through a number of emotional connections. There’s myth, music, memory, meaning and magic. Thus, as language dies, these, too, suffer an unchangeable metamorphosis. Each death, no matter how silent, is a brutal pinch, acted, felt and witnessed simultaneously. The overall tenor blurs the lines so the flash appears to be looking outward and inward, revealing past, present and future at the same time. Brutally effective.
“Do not outlaw music but forbid storytelling; forbid remembrance.”
No One Dies of Longing by Anjali Sachdev – Strange Horizons, April Issue
What’s not to love about a tale of magical vengeance? Especially one set in a stunning garden that blooms in a desert thanks to the talents of a team of captive witches. The prose is so lush and descriptive, the garden becomes nearly tangible. At the same time, there’s a quietness to it that allows the story to meander rather than rush.
“Even the birds here are meek… Petal by petal, the ungenerous garden parcels out its glories to them; timidly, they accept, sheltering in the shadows of someone else’s paradise.”
Sachdeva conjures a world that straddles the line between fantasy and reality. There’s subtle commentary on financial hardships and the too-good-to-be-true job offers set in faraway lands that end up becoming prison sentences, passports becoming confiscated in cages made of iron. Iron one can neither charm nor fight.
“Iron is what remains when a star expires: metal from which all ardor has been drained; the deadest thing in the universe.”
Woven through this enchanting world are the threads of quiet, desperate longing. Longing for home, freedom, family and familiar, hopefully less cruel, pastures. This quiet yearning sang to me from start to finish, making the twist at the end appear shocking and making me sit up straight. All in all, remarkably poignant.
“Land that scorns the one who watered it is cursed land indeed.”
Shadows on the Pavement by R. P. Sand – Lightspeed, Issue # 180
“I am helpless under your sonorous essence, an untethered leaf wracked by thunderous mountain storms.”
A remarkably visceral flash piece on climate change that not only resonates, but also makes one shake a little in their shoes. It certainly did that for me, in particularly due to the author’s choice to switch between first and second person. A choice that worked incredibly well with the overall theme, allowing for the threat and consequences of this catastrophe looming over us in the present to appear less abstract and more personal.
Structured like a personal account of nature and life speaking to us—the individual and collective humanity—in the way one recalls, narrates the courting of a beloved, there’s a mystical romance to this short that really hits deep. It’s a love story gone horribly wrong because one part stopped listening.
“Mine is a primal, throttled fear: all I will have left would be the ghost of your memory prowling my thoughts, your last body buried deep within my bones, that you will never rise again to walk on two legs.
That you will no longer be mine.”
The magnitude of the grief of it all simmers unbearably even as the prose mesmerizes. The conflicting duality of this breaks your heart, making your chest feel heavy, not unlike the way concrete smothers earth. Sand allows you to feel this suffocating sorrow before dialing up the rage. Anger at the arrogance and cruel inconsideration of those lamenting the death of the earth even as they instigate and amplify it. The fury doesn’t end, it merely seeps into a final message. Not an urge or a plea, but a tender warning to listen. Deeply evocative.
The Library of the Apocalypse by Rati Mehrotra – Clarkesworld, Issue # 224
A dystopian apocalyptic future ravaged by war whereby a group of humans, linked mentally, are mingling about on a full moon’s night. They are searching for something akin to a sign or a signpost. It can appear in any shape and form, be of any color or material. The only consistency these magical objects carry are the words that welcome them to a library.
It’s a mysterious place, this library, for while it does provide many adventures and has literal, magical books that one can fall into, there’s no guarantee if one will return from this expedition. And still, our few dwindling survivors cannot wait to go in.
“We always go, even though we don’t know how many of us will make it back. What is there for us here but the detritus of a fallen city?
Each other, Sheila whispers. We have each other.”
Mehrotra paints a world of stark, absolute desolation. This is a violent, war-torn land, just one of the many cities being reduced to rubble with no thought to the people who dwell in there. Amid this man-made destructive landscape, the Library becomes a metaphor for countless sentiments: yearning, escape, refuge, memory, dreams, separation, death and home.
“Home. The word holds so many meanings, most of which have been destroyed. We trudge back to our subway car… thinking of all our missing selves. Our wrecked homes. Our beloved dead. Trying to gather the tattered pieces of our hearts together.
We were seven, who are now five.”
The prose is as easy as the emotions carrying this short. There’s pain, anger, worry, fear and shock. There’s the desperate hope for a better tomorrow and the quiet, inescapable, numbing sorrow when that hope tears asunder. The twist about the narrator comes at a point of devastating grief. But just when one believes all is lost, a new ray of tenderness, a new beginning reaches out to grab the offered hand. Devastating and desperately moving.
Beak by Ian Muneshwar – Nightmare, Issue # 152
“Nadia’s skin is a patchwork of welts at different stages of development. In her less rational moments, she thinks she can feel an itching even inside parts of her body that the insects would never feed from.”
A lone woman tries to tackle a beg-bug infestation while locked in her apartment building during the pandemic. Truly the stuff nightmares are made of, and I mean that in the best possible way, with descriptions so visceral, they left me squirming. The protagonist’s preoccupation with the bed-bugs is both, realistic and surreal at the same time. And this trope of simultaneity carries throughout the story as the lines between pleasure and pain, real and imagination get blurred.
Obsession itself was a trope here, I feel. Fixation on an idea, a thing, an insect, a sensation, a truth that you can see and feel while everyone else demands very specific proofs to believe their existence. The last in particular serves as a commentary on the banal absurdity of Nadia’s—and by virtue, any person living in the present times—very stuck and relatable circumstances. Be it the nonsensical demands from her landlord demanding “living” proof of the infestation, to the lack of access to basic necessities during the lockdown. Problems that could be easily resolved and yet only continue to fester and spread, not unlike an actual bed-bug infestation.
Nadia’s instant, imminent relief at finding another person with the same bite marks is an incredibly poignant moment in the story. Muneshwar allows the reader to truly feel her emotions, the ultimate reassurance that all that’s been happening has been real and is not, in fact, a figment of her imagination. From there the tale deviates more inward, exploring more of the blurred lines between pain and pleasure and what either can mean, do for the body and mind.
“She dreams of the moment in which the consequence of her gluttony, whatever it might be, becomes inevitable.
For this, the bedbug gave up her wings. To experience a single moment opened by the knowledge that her body was never meant to save her.”
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And that marks the end of our Dimensional Diaries for this issue. If you’ve read any of these stories and have enjoyed our overview of them, we hope you’ll reach out and share your thoughts. If you’d like more recommendations of the new South Asian speculative fiction that’s come about this quarter, please do check out our recent Spotlight of the Himal Fiction Fest, Part 1 & 2.
For my fellow bookworms, we also have just recently ventured out with a Tasavvur Book Club, whereby we read a new South Asian speculative fiction book and a couple short stories each month and get together online to discuss them. If you’d like to be a part of this little interactive community, just drop us a DM on any of our socials, and our team will get back whenever they can. Plus, if you’re not just a reader and also a South Asian author who would like us to review or spotlight your upcoming work here, please feel free to write to us at: hello@tasavvurnama.com.
And with that I’ll bid you goodbye for now, dear reader, to hopefully meet again next quarter.
Happy reading until then!