‘Cow and Company’ by Parashar Kulkarni

Sticking with Granta Magazine and the idea of larger-than-life figures, here’s a story that won the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He was the first Indian to win it and it was his first work of short fiction to be published. It follows four men looking for a cow to be the mascot of the British Chewing Gum Company in colonial India in the early-1900s. They need this cow as part of their publicity campaign to lure people away from chewing paan to their gum. “What better way to get the natives to love our chewing gum than to link it to the cow? … The cow chews all day long. All Hindus love cows. If we use her on our posters they will love our chewing gum.” With humor and satire, Kulkarni takes on class, caste, religion, race, gender, and more here.

First published in Granta online, May 2016, and available to read here, and later published as part of the novel Cow and Company, Viking, 2019

‘Fish Tank’ by Hananah Zaheer

Here’s another story that takes on gender, religion, and class issues and is also set in an office. A US-educated, free-willed young woman starts working at a government office in Lahore, Pakistan and disrupts the lives of the four conservative men reporting to her. The first-person plural point-of-view is used rather skillfully here to show both the collective mindset and the lack of self-knowledge among these men. Overall, it’s a sly, satirical take on that ancient, misogynistic belief that when a man is agitated by a woman’s appearance or behavior, it is the woman who must be stopped to told to behave differently. Zaheer avoids tired, old tropes here, though, and lets events run their natural course as they would in the real world. Also, that’s a terrific opening — setting up a whole lot of reader expectations upfront.

First published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Winter/Spring 2018, and available to read here

‘India’ by Ramapada Chowdhury, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha

As for openings that set up a lot of reader expectations, here’s one more. Please read the translator’s note provided with the story there. Set in British India, this story is really an allegory for colonialism in India. It’s also much more, of course, in how it depicts human nature and all our deepest needs. Chowdhury was an astute socio-political observer and he wrote about the world wars, the Bengal famine, the India-Pakistan partition, and such big, historical events. His storytelling was all about getting readers emotionally vested so that they would be left disturbed. This story is very Chekhovian in how it builds complications very matter-of-factly, and yet keeps the action always escalating. The three-sentence ending is an efficient but heartbreaking summation of what colonialism does to the colonized.

First published in Asymptote and available to read here. Also collected in The Greatest Hindi Stories Ever Told, Aleph, 2020

‘The Left Behind’ by Madiha Sattar

Endings can be heartbreaking even when they don’t turn out to be quite as we (and the characters) might be dreading. In this story about an 86-year-old Karachi cobbler and a young woman, that’s what happens. Both are missing their loved ones: the cobbler’s son has disappeared due to some mysterious involvement with the Taliban or the state intelligence agencies; the woman’s husband has left her suddenly for another. The woman begins taking her damaged shoes to the cobbler for repair but, as they’re both dealing with even deeper emotional damage, they start confiding in each other. The story progresses in ways that have us waiting for, if you’ll excuse the pun, the other shoe to drop. And then, right at the end, the husband returns and the son isn’t among those found dead. This leaves both characters without the closure they need to be able to move on in some fashion. And that’s what breaks our hearts even as the cobbler and the woman go on as best they can.

First published in Guernica, September 2017 and available to read online here

‘Hands’ by Anwara Syed Haq, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya

Let’s move from shoe repair work to household items repair work. And from Karachi, Pakistan to Jashore (as Jessore is now officially known), Bangladesh. There’s a young woman here too. Only, she’s all of twelve years and needs her doll mended by the repairman. And, oh yes, we have a couple of disappearances in this story too. About halfway in, the story takes a chilling, harrowing turn where the repairman is called on to do the biggest job of his life and you will hold your breath hoping for him to succeed. The narrative has a lovely folktale-like cadence and even uses some of the usual folktale tropes in how the characters are introduced and the scenes progress. A story with a timeless charm.

First published in translation in Words Without Borders, January 2013, and available to read here

‘Rizana’ by Kalaivaathy Kaleel, translated from Sinhala by K.S. Sivakumaran

Let’s stay with the household work theme. The note at the top of this story says that it is “. . . based on the life of Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan girl convicted and subsequently executed in Saudi Arabia for the alleged murder of four-month-old Naif al-Quthaibi.” Nafeek was allegedly 17 years old when she arrived to work in Saudi Arabia in 2005. Her parents alleged that her passport was forged to adjust the year of birth so she could legally work abroad as a domestic helper. When the infant dies in her care, she’s accused of smothering it after a fight with her employer. Nafeek claimed the baby choked accidentally during a feeding. There was no post-mortem and Nafeek was beheaded based on a confession she signed in Arabic, which she could not read. This is a fictional account but it works with all these facts of Nafeek’s life to go beyond the headlines.

First published in translation in Words Without Borders, June 2013, and available to read here

‘Everybody Knows’ by Anisha Sridhar

Still staying with household matters, let’s end on a relatively lighter note (not in terms of theme but in terms of narrative style.) Here’s a story about the service people who do or support all the household work in India. Published during the 2020 pandemic, this is about what happens to that entire household labor economy when the upper classes decide to take care of themselves without any consideration for how daily wage earners will fare. And especially at a time when the latter are even more vulnerable. In India, this service class, from maids to delivery people to drivers and more, is the backbone of the country’s urban economy and has suffered the most. Sridhar’s satirical take here has plenty of bite. If only the people who need to read and understand it the most would find the time to do so instead of looking at blue skies and blooming flowers and the stars while congratulating themselves for being good citizens by wearing masks and practicing social distance.

First published in Infection House, August 2020 and available to read here

Introduction

My original idea of a personal anthology was of one grandly curated and thematically unified. However, in the end I simply chose 12 stories which have always stuck in my mind. What I’ve discovered is that I like my short stories short, and quirky (one might even say, more unkindly, gimmicky). If your tastes lie in the same direction, then you may enjoy:

‘Having a Wonderful Time’ by J G Ballard

J G Ballard is rarely conventional, but his more experimental work tends to be found in his short stories. One of my favourites is ‘Having a Wonderful Time’, written, as the title suggests, as a series of postcards. Diana and her husband Richard head off to Las Palmas for two weeks of sun and sand in July, only to discover that, when the time comes to return to England, their departure has been delayed, first by a day, but soon indefinitely. Diana adapts, pursuing amateur dramatics as well as a crush on Beach Counsellor Mark, but Richard claims the holiday complexes are “human reserves” and intends to form a resistance group. Written in the clipped, upbeat tone of the typical postcard (for those old enough to remember) Richard’s desperate rebellion plays out against Diana’s rehearsals.

First published in Bananas, Spring 1978 and collected in Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982, and now available in The Complete Stories of J G Ballard Volume 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘Gregor’ by Quim Monzó, translated by Peter Bush

It is always tempting to include Franz Kafka in any short story anthology, so what better way to avoid this than by including a Kafka tribute instead? Quim Monzó is a Catalan writer who delights in the absurd, and so is naturally attracted to riffing on Kafka’s work in a story where an insect finds itself transformed into a person. His family are surprisingly forgiving but, of course, small and remote, and, once he has gained control of his body and can walk to the bathroom, he is surprised to find himself upset by his nakedness. Monzó’s story is much shorter than Kafka’s but, despite making an entirely different point, it does confirm that it’s always the insects who suffer.

First published in the Catalan in Guadalajara, Quadems Crema, 1996, and in English in Guadalajara, Open Letter, 2011

‘Kreativ Riting’ by Brian McCabe

Brian McCabe’s ‘Kreativ Riting’ remains, for me, the most accurate portrayal of the classroom in Scottish fiction. Lasting only one ill-fated lesson, it begins when English teacher PK (“ ‘cause his name’s Pitcairn and he’s a nut”) decides a period of creative writing is in order. The lesson is soon disrupted by the narrator, Joe, a pupil who, we soon discover, likes to be the centre of attention. Of course, any experienced teacher will tell you that PK’s plan – asking the pupils to empty their heads, listen to classical music, and write down “whatever floats into your mind” – is far from fool-proof. As well as being very funny, what makes the story interesting is that, although Joe’s favourite gambit is to impersonate a Neanderthal by hitting his head with his fist, his intelligence cannot be disguised – punning punctuation into punk-tuition for example. What he eventually writes, and what he does with it, make for a rather downbeat ending, however.

First published in In a Dark Room with a Stranger, Hamish Hamilton, 1993

‘The Peacocks’ by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin

I whole-heartedly recommend reading all of Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud’s stories available in English – which unfortunately, at the moment, encompasses only this single volume. ‘The Peacocks’ is a story of death – the death of the narrator’s lover, Marie, but also, we suspect, the death of everything: it’s apocalyptic poetry which predates The Road by thirty years. In five pages we learn of their life together, increasingly bereft of other people for reasons which are never explained, and the consolations of culture which cannot overcome the sadness at the heart of it. The two peacocks they have been living with provide the most horrific aspect of the denouement. When someone we love dies, it can feel like the end of the world; in ‘The Peacocks’ it is.

First published as ‘Les Paons’ in La Belle Charbonnière, Grasset, 1976. First published in English in A Life on Paper, Small Beer Press, 2010

‘Acid’ by James Kelman

James Kelman has, without doubt, a claim to be Britain’s greatest living writer (see, for example, two International Man Booker Prize nominations when it was awarded for a writer’s body of work) so it seems perverse to choose a story which is less than half a page long as representative of his skill. And yet ‘Acid’ has such power, told, as always, in a colloquial voice (which is not to say Glaswegian), the fragment of an overheard conversation, and with the seemingly throwaway phrase “who was also the young man’s father” deftly unparenthetical. A story to be read in single intake of breath. (And if that wasn’t enough, the story also appears in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, in the Index of Plagiarisms in reference to a non-existent chapter 47).

First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983, and available in Tales of Here and Then, thi wurd, 2020

‘Toward Happy Civilisation’ by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Mouthful of Birds contains a number of wonderful stories, but perhaps my favourite is ‘Toward Happy Civilisation’ which begins like a Western and ends like an out-take from Kafka’s Amerika. It starts simply enough with a man being refused a train ticket. As a result, the train does not stop and the man is stranded and is soon lodging with the station master and his wife, yet he refuses to abandon his dream of boarding the train. The story performs a deft sleight of hand when the perspective shifts from being entirely Gruner’s and draws back (“Gruner’s actions that first day are the same as this of everyone who has ever been in his situation”) to emphasise his dream is not unique. Like so much of Schweblin’s work, the story’s ending allows us to feel something we already know only when it is revealed.

First published in Spanish in Pajros en la boca, 2010, and in English in The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2019, and available to read online here. Collected in Mouthful of Birds, Oneworld, 2019