Word Count: 718 | Reading Time: 3 min
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the worlds—real, historical and speculative—that we inhabit, perhaps, occasionally, simultaneously. Naturally, that chain of thought has also led me to ponder the variety of languages that allow these worlds to be birthed and are, again, perhaps, occasionally, simultaneously, birthed within.
For example, there’re dialects to the architecture of these worlds: the coordinates of physically present tourist locations, the native signs towards particularly ambiguous destinations, the ancient and new names of the historically famous streets, window styles still prevalent from days of the old and doorknobs carved with present day proportions. There’s an etymology of the nature and time in these worlds: the sounds of the food streets, the smells of the spots where pigeons and crows gather to eat, the lingering sensory reminisces of who walked, laughed, loved, touched, died and lived where and how. Whence was the forest, which used to stand near that particularly treacherous curve in the road with a knee-deep pothole, entirely lost to sight. Where was the river’s absence—or a renewed, more dangerous presence—first witnessed, and the attendance of flowers in the city last felt. There’s the prose of the people who dwell in the political and economic centers of these worlds, and the poetry of those exiled to the peripheries. Semantics of the slightly cruel and inherently kind, allegories for the liked as well as loathed, taunts for the loved yet disrespected, and metaphors for the caught, crumbled and eventually but perhaps not entirely free.
Language thus, is a twofold act, a dual verb; it becomes even as it makes/breaks. By virtue, I suppose, so are stories. The undertaking of telling one preconditions the will to listen even as it desires it. This newest edition of Tasavvur is a collection of stories that cradle similar intricate dualities at their hearts. There’s a multi-spatiality to these tales, a concurrency of either juxtaposed emotion, time or place, if not all, that pushes the reader to question and examine their own emotions, time and place.
Shefali Elizabeth Mathew’s “Café for the Living” is a tender ode to a young daughter’s immortal grief for the loss of a parent. It explores the complexities of life, love, work, and the dense lingering and waning of sorrow in a world conflicted with poverty and social discord, whereby a family of women build magical table-top river-graves with special slots for the living to send letters to the dead. It ends on a hopeful note that makes one want to weep.
“The Human Banyan” by Maria Zafar narrates, in evocative silence, the abject suffering of a nameless woman as she slowly, painfully transforms into a tree. There’s an enduring heartache to the tale, the quietly sinister indifference of her spouse and her own passivity with her physical, emotional anguish augmented by the serene mundanity of the world around her. The end haunts the reader, leaving them to question the normalization of violence, neglect, and the disturbing repetition of cycles if not broken.
Lastly, in fiction, is Archita Mittra’s “The Other Wives”, first published in Human Monsters: A Horror Anthology by Dark Matter Magazine, edited by Sadie Hartmann and Ashley Saywers. A gothic tale of a lone woman as she slowly discovers the horrifying secrets hidden in her rich husband’s big countryside mansion. All the people in the present are eerily silent, the ghosts of the past trapped loudly between the walls. Slowly, as the disillusionment of her too-good-to-be-true new life settles in, so does the realization that, sometimes, love can turn out to be your worst possible nightmare.
First on the non-fiction end, we have for you Nudrat Kamal’s comprehensive essay on the presence and use of time travel in modernist Urdu fiction. Lastly, by yours truly, the newest issue of Dimensional Diaries, our detailed round-up blog of South Asian speculative fiction published in the first quarter of 2025. Knitting these all together is the truly spectacular cover art by Mariam Taufeeq.
Dear reader, I hope this issue, its art and all the stories assembled therein, will give you something to hold on to and wonder: a feeling, a question, an answer to a never voiced query.
I leave you to read, hum and ponder.
Ayesha Channa