Short Story: My Sherlock
By Srirupa Dhar
Just a moment’s flicker and then I see a pale yellow creature resting on to a Lego piece. The creature seemed to be unsure of its sudden landing. It was trying to hide the tip of its dark brown legs.
Short Story: Her bifocals saw the full monty
By Srirupa Dhar
Glasses clinked with the malty smell of Scotch whiskeys and oaky bouquet of Chardonnays. The bitter tartness of alcohol intimately medleyed with the floral fragrances of Gucci and Chanel. The middle-aged self-complacent men savored the drinks as they cracked bawdy jokes.
Book Review: Amitava Kumar’s ‘The Lovers’
By Suranjana Choudhury
The novel is a tapestry of various texts woven around the lives of the other characters through the teasing, playful voice of the author-narrator. With anecdotes, excerpts from other books, interviews, clandestine letters, overlapping memories, Kumar lucidly builds this very exciting narrative.
Flash Fiction: The Artist
By Nishi Pulugurtha
My art is my solace. I paint whenever I feel like it. It makes me feel nice. I passed school, struggled through college. Huge canvasses, paints, brushes are strewn all over my room. I paint when I feel like it; this is my world, my life.
Book Review: Rashida Murphy’s ‘The Historian’s Daughter’
By Bhaswati Ghosh
The Historian’s Daughter engages as much with its plot twists as with its honesty and narrative sweep. The language is crisp, the imagery vibrant, and the plotlines like stable trellises for the vines they support.
An excerpt from Shankha Ghosh’s Partition novella, ‘The Rows of Areca Nut Trees’
By Shankha Ghosh
It was Dwadashi, the Twelfth Day of Durga Puja. Today Neelu and others would leave. Since morning, he was lying down quietly in the attic. Something so terrible had happened yesterday and still no one could figure it out. People were silent in the house.
Flash Fiction: Entwined
By Amrita De
The newspapers next day reported my death, as another failed instance of a fragile attempt by an upper caste emancipator to voice the suffering of the ‘need to be emancipated’ Dalit woman. There were no protest marches or fevered sloganeering.
Short Story: A Fractured Reader
By Apoorva Saini
Although in this big universe small things like these have stopped mattering to people, I fear if you do not hurry, Sudhama Kumar will be dead by the time you finish reading this letter. I just thought, by writing to you I might reach somebody who is ‘kind of nice’ and might want to help a dying man.
Book Excerpt: From Sameer Khan’s ‘Spinning Top and Other Stories’
By Sameer Khan
Farhan had never been a practicing Muslim. He visited a masjid only to offer namaz for Eid or an occasional Friday namaz. But now he joined Suleiman often at the local masjid for prayers.
Book Review: Torsa Ghosal’s ‘Open Couplets’
By Sourya Chowdhury
Ghosal’s novel uses the quest motif as a catalyst. The main plot revolves around ethnographer Ira Chatterjee embarking on parallel journeys to locate two very different artists. However, it is difficult to sum up a work that relies so heavily on the reader’s participation; the text is ingrained in a postmodern universe where meaning is always contingent and protean.
Book Excerpt: From Chanis Fernando Boisard’s ‘The Ayah and Other Stories’
By Chanis Fernando Boisard
Book Excerpt: From Chanis Fernando Boisard’s ‘The Ayah and Other Stories’.
Short Story: The Eye
By Srirupa Dhar
Her skin is a canvas against which her stark life is painted. Blackness sculpts every bit of her life. It weaves into the fatigue of a copper sun, copper moon, copper water, copper everything. Sharon’s life is entrenched in black, a color that absorbs every other color but itself suffers the threat of otherness.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 