Dear Traveller,
I hope this missive finds you well. Here’s s question: what kind of role does the speculative play in society today? In a world where we are constantly accosted with the worst possible natural and man-made disasters, the speculative is, we know, a place from which to imagine otherwise. In this, our ninth issue, the stories we’ve picked explore the tensions between what we know and cannot be known, subject positions that can be inhabited and those that remain opaque to us despite our desires to own things, people, places, to confront the political and social limits of knowledge. To this end we have four incredible stories and one all-encompassing critical piece to reflect on the limits and powers of knowledge in this issue of Tassavur––read them all to discover sharp, unique perspectives.
For example, in the story “Disappeared” by Divya Chand, two groups of people experience the same land differently depending on whether they are native to the land or not. The land under question is Kashmir, and we’re observing a scene in a travel agency where it appears the tulips have disappeared. “What could make thousands of people lose their ability to see them?” the narrator asks. What indeed?
Atrayee Gupta gives us language play in “Ghost-Tending,” estranging the quotidian elements of intimate family life through her idiomatic rendition of Bangla in English; somehow, the ghostly feels ghostlier in the story’s clipped language. Feel it for yourself when you read the story.
“Mr. Prasad, how are you feeling?” the doctor asks the narrator in Prasant Atluri’s “Tea and Jasmine.” “Sometimes the process can be [. . .] unsettling.” The story revolves around the narrator’s encounter with unnamed procedures and treatments to “down regulate” his “sensorium” to match what we might call neurotypical levels. Does the process succeed?
Finally in fiction, we have Rida Altaf’s “MIRACLE-TECH,” a story that thinks about the tensions between religion and science. If the rains have finally come, is it because of prayer or machine-engineered rain? This question is one that plays on the narrator’s mind, and leaves the reader feeling bittersweet feelings. Immerse yourself in the problem and read it!
For a comprehensive discussion on a very timely problem, read Shanzeh Afzal’s essay “The Opposite of Colonization is Indigenization: Imagining Energy Futures through South Asian Science Fiction.” Afzal takes Vandana Singh’s “Indra’s Web” as a text through which to understand the complicated social structures that undergird our relationship to energy problems today, and is a compelling read.
That’s all for this issue of Tasavvur. Until next time––stay weird, traveller!
Dr. Mehak F. Khan