I grew up wishing I could be Lyra Silvertongue. I wanted to be the girl with the tawny hair and vivid blue eyes, leaping across the roofs of Oxford, traveling with the Gypsies, and tricking armored bears. But my corner of Karachi was very unlike Oxford College, and imagination was not enough to erase my dissatisfaction with my appearance and my wit. And it wasn’t just Lyra. Every heroine I loved belonged to a world entirely different from mine. Anne with her red hair and her acres of breathtaking forests. Lucy and Susan inside their giant English mansion finding magical wardrobes. Of course, it was partly the alienness of these stories to me that made them so entrancing. But it also left me craving a reality that made me forget that my own surroundings, with their wide-terraced bungalows, sultry monsoons, and salt flecked oceans, were equally magical. It took me quite a long time to piece together that the stories I loved were white-washed, and if you combined that with an unhealthy dose of the remnants of colonialism, it led to dissatisfactory aspirations.
It wasn’t that I had no access to fantastical literature in Urdu, I had read several books that captured a totally different version of surreal narratives–full of devs, paris, tricksters, and parallel dimensions. But, I studied at a British School, and I had been taught English so thoroughly that people around me joked that even my Urdu was accented with English. I thought in English, and I dreamt in English. And I wanted to write in English.
When I first began to write, I tried to bridge these two worlds, bringing the poetic, untranslatable tilisms of Urdu fantasy to life within the confines of English narrative structure. But I was forced to learn that it was not always easy to find space for South Asian speculative literature written in English.
As an editor at Tasavvur I want to make space for the young writers out there, who once dreamt of being characters they could never even look like, to write stories that don’t have to make typical English sense. I want them to bring their jadugars, and their churails. I want them to tell stories that meander forever, and characters that aren’t heroes and don’t go on journeys at all. I want them to write without feeling the pressure of combining the white-washed fantasies of their childhood with the essence of the stories whispered to them by their grandparents. I want them to create without fearing that the doors will not open if they do not conform to the locks.
We’ve had three wonderful issues brimming with such stories and original voices. But I’m particularly proud of Issue 04 because we’ve discovered some previously unpublished writers with raw, powerful stories to tell. ‘Old Prints and Fresh Snow’ examines the tenuous relationships that exist within a desi household through a conversation between what appear to be estranged siblings. It is a reminder of the things that damage families simply because culture forces them to remain unspoken. ‘The Eye of the Warrior’ reimagines a mythical tale, but subverts expectations by switching the main character and giving her more fire, and more autonomy, than her original tale allowed her to possess. ‘Rain in the Potholes’ explores a dystopia that may already be a reality for people in many parts of the world. It explores the familiar South Asian themes of married couples yearning for children, but like the potholes themselves, this story has hidden layers. ‘The Seven Degree Celsius Mango’ is a lyrical piece that unravels like an old memory. It takes well-known elements of science fiction, bursting planets and post-apocalypses, and gives them new life in the world of mangoes and Northern Pakistan. Shreya Ila Anasuya’s ‘Gul’ is a timeless story of love, and magic, of goddesses and witchcraft. But between its elegiac prose is a heartbreaking commentary on womanhood and survival. And finally, Nudrat Kamal’s nonfiction article is a deep dive into South Asian futurisms, and all the bizarre, beautiful worlds South Asian writers have fearlessly begun to create. Just like the stories you’ll find in this issue. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did.