The Lepchas are a tribe who we hear about or encounter intermittently – the smiling faced people who inhabit parts of the Dooars, Darjeeling, Nepal, south western Bhutan and Sikkim – glimpsed perhaps on a holiday or seen in their tribal finery in photographs. As with all tribal folk, the Lepchas have their own rich lore of folk tales, stories of how the world they call their own began. ‘In the beginning there was nothing …Then Itbu-moo, the Mother Creator, shaped the mountains, the rivers, and the lakes. But something was missing. Why did her creation feel empty? So, taking a fresh ball of snow, she created the first man’ whose name was Fudonthing.
Category > Short stories
From the Dawn of Time
A Song of Diaspora
New Anthem (The): The Subcontinent In Its Own Words by Ahmede Hussein
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There are certain things that we can now deduce from the subcontinent – that most of the writers in the anthology would prefer to be somewhere else. That South Asia is unfailingly a place of domestic violence, poverty and oppression, best looked at during brief visits from outside the country and then left behind. This may seem to be a harsh assessment but in story after story, this is what emerges.
Ahmede Hussain’s anthology brings together what he describes as ‘strong new voices in South Asian fiction’ that hold the mirror up to the countries they inhabit and put down the reflections in their own words. The 22 short stories are by names we have heard of, Raj Kamal Jha, Kamila Shamsie, Mahmud Rahman, Padma Viswanathan, Khademul Islam, Mohsin Hamid, Monideepa Sahu and Amit Chaudhuri and some of the chosen pieces come from noted, award winning novels.
Small Troubled Worlds
Ghalib at Dusk by Nighat M Gandhi
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An assembly of minute details observed with a sensitive eye and put together in a series of stories that celebrate every day life. Nighat Gandhi’s Ghalib at Dusk is noteworthy because of the fact that the author manages to put her finger on the common pulse that unites daily life in Pakistan and India.
The stories crisscross places and cultures, travelling from Karachi to Ahmedabad and Allahabad, towns that are out of the mainstream bustle. They also traverse emotional tangles and domestic dilemmas and the contrast between outward life and inner emotions.
This is most apparent in the story that gives the collection its title, the tale of the partially handicapped Babar who lives with his sisters and is a Ghalib aficionado.
Murder in the Dark
Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems by Margaret Atwood
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Having thoroughly enjoyed several of Margaret Atwood’s novels, from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘ through ‘Surfacing’ to ‘Alias Grace’, I was intrigued to see ‘Murder in the Dark’ described as a collection of ‘short fictions and prose poems’. I make several long bus journeys a week, and if you’re sandwiched between giggling schoolgirls and someone booming down their mobile phone while the guy at the back is singing along to Alice Cooper on his ipod, it’s not an atmosphere conducive to getting absorbed in a five-hundred page novel. But these little gems take just a couple of minutes each to read and each demands to be savoured before you go on to the next one.
