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The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam

OUTSTANDING SHORT FICTION FROM ONE OF BANGLADESH’S MOST INGENIOUS WRITERS. In the village of Modhupur, the new mother Julekha’s breasts dry up, but to everyone’s consternation, her little baby finds a dog to suckle on; Allah’s angel gives little Khobir fifty takas to buy sweets but his gambling father snatches the money away; journalist Jamil spirals hearing that all communication has been cut off in his hometown of Roop Nagar after a girl is gangraped, hacked, cooked and eaten by young men; Modhu, a penniless farmhand, leaves for Dhaka to drive a rickshaw two weeks a month, while his wife is actively wooed and seduced by his neighbour; Aminul Islam gets slaughtered at a butcher’s shop in broad daylight on protesting the spiking of pure lamb meat with sheep and goat-meat. Bordering on hyper-reality, leading Bengali writer Mashiul Alam’s stories hold up a mirror to Bangladeshi society. He effortlessly crosses over into the surreal, which at times, as a means for us to cope and sustain, serves as an escape from the blatant, daily horrors of reality, or turns the reader into a spectator witnessing heightened versions of plausible macabre events. Some stories disrupt our complacency while a few others are immensely tender—but all of them intensely political and rendered in sharp, precise prose. The Meat Market is a dazzling collection marking the arrival of a world-class writer for those who read in English.

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The Scent of Fallen Stars

By Aishwarya Jha

In 1995, thirty-six-year-old loner Will, historical scholar and product of a vanishing upper crust British stoicism, arrives in New Delhi. Smarting from the collapse of his academic dreams, he is drawn there by an inexplicable urgency, but finds little fulfilment in his well-paying telecommunications job, the narrow expat community and his tenuous relationship. One night, propelled by the sensory splendour of the monsoon, he encounters young, enigmatic Leela, whose fateful appearance in his world catalyses a storm of passion and devastation that will alter it forever. Twenty-three years later, Aria sets foot on the soil of her birth for the first time, on a quest to find the mother whom she believed to be dead. Estranged from her convalescing father, her journey leads her to unravel the mysteries of her parents’ story and her mother’s life, from her childhood in an orphanage to a consuming but doomed love affair and, finally, to the remote shores of asceticism, severing all ties with the world. As she searches for answers and a sense of belonging, Aria stumbles upon a new world of ancient tradition—and the explosive secret that torpedoed her father’s life, the reverberations of which will be cataclysmic for her own.

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This Land We Call Home

By Nusrat F. Jafri

In 1871, the British enacted the Criminal Tribes Act in India, branding numerous tribes and caste groups as criminals. In This Land We Call Home, Nusrat F. Jafri traces the roots of her nomadic forebears, who belonged to one such ‘criminal’ tribe, the Bhantus from Rajasthan. This affecting memoir explores religious and multicultural identities and delves into the profound concepts of nation-building and belonging. Nusrat’s family found acceptance in the church, alongside a sense of community, theology, songs and carnivals, and quality education for the children in missionary schools. The family’s conversion to Christianity in response to caste society highlights their struggle for dignity. Parallelly, we see the family’s experiences during Gandhi’s return to India in 1915, the Partition, the World Wars, the Emergency and the prime ministers’ assassinations. In a way, this is a story like and unlike the stories all of us carry within us―the inherited weight of who we are and where we come from, our tiny little freedoms and our everyday struggles and, mostly, the intricate jumble of our collective ancestry. Nusrat pays homage to her foremothers, the first feminists, and her forefathers, the ones who tried hard to fit into a caste society only to be disappointed, eventually choosing alternative faiths in pursuit of acceptance.

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This, Our Paradise

By Karan Mujoo

Srinagar, 1986. A Kashmiri Pandit family has just moved into their new home. The patriarch Papaji is a clerk in a food cooperative and his wife Byenji is a homemaker. The narrator is their eight-year-old grandson who spends his days playing cricket and climbing the tang kul in the garden. Everything is rosy till 1989. But then, propelled by ISI and the Jamaat, a secessionist movement rises and changes everything. Lolab valley, 1968. After years of prayers, a boy named Shahid is born to Zun and her husband. He grows up in a society where corruption and unemployment are rife. The trajectory of his life changes when he meets Syed Sahab ― an Islamic theologian and rabble- rouser, who wants to overthrow the Indian state. The stories of both families intertwine tragically. In both cases, the boys are at the mercy of forces much larger than them. Both lose their Kashmir, in different ways.

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