Category: Short Stories
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Rights: World rights available (excluding Indian subcontinent)
Time is arguably our biggest enemy. And memory, perhaps, our greatest curse. Which makes forgetting the hardest thing to do. These are stories of difficult pasts, and the struggle to leave them behind. Identical-twin rickshaw drivers are wrongly suspected of terrorism in paranoid Bombay; a Calcutta merchant envies each saree he sells for the intimacy it’ll share with the woman who buys it; an illicit love affair is conducted over nine potent text messages; a lonely astronaut sings out loud, hoping his voice will find an ear somewhere; adivasis, jawans, Naxalites, policemen and journalists in Orissa are caught in a web of violence unleashed on them by both their own histories and that of a nation helplessly repeating it. Forty-nine tales that speak of the power of forgetting.
The author: Devashish Makhija