‘Arrival’ by Gurnaik Johal

I first encountered this story as a judge of the Galley Beggar Short Story Award. We read fifty stories and this one instantly stood out for me – happily, the other judges agreed and it won the prize. It’s astonishingly brief – 6 pages; 1,500 words – but packs so much in, I kept looking for hidden trapdoors. It’s about a husband and wife who live near Heathrow Airport and let people use their driveway as a parking space. But one traveller fails to return for her car and they start using it themselves – and that’s just the set-up. It’s one of those rare stories where every sentence – bang, bang, bang – does something. It gives us the trajectory of a whole relationship in shorthand. And Johal was some disgusting age like 22 when he wrote it.

First published as a shortlisted story on the Galley Beggar Short Story Award website in 2021, where it can be read online, and as part of the collection We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022

‘Arrival’ by Gurnaik Johal

Full disclaimer: I work for the publisher of this book, but what a talented writer Gurnaik Johal is. At Serpent’s Tail we have just published Johal’s debut novel Saraswati, which has been highly anticipated due to We Move. Within the collection, Johal excels at telling intricate, delicate stories crossing the generations of a small corner of Northwest London, centring around the British-Punjabi communities in Southall and Northolt, near Heathrow airport.

Within “Arrival”, Johal finds a way of telling two different love stories through the single device of an abandoned car. The car belongs to Divya, and has been left stranded at the house of family friends Chetan and Aanshi. Chetan is expecting to pick up Divya from the airport, but she doesn’t arrive, and they are stuck with the car. We eventually discover that the no-show is because she has decided not to marry her fiancé, who arrives to pick up the car in a tense scene that opens and ends the story. In between, waiting for news, Chetan and Aanshi begin to use the car. They enjoy taking trips to IKEA, Windsor, and Brighton, their romance reilluminated by the novelty of the vehicle in their lives. It’s very sweet, and even when the car is collected, they are left in a sense of happiness, perhaps with a slight sense of cheekiness at getting caught. The story – which reminds me a bit of Mike Leigh’s films – is told so skilfully. It’s a terrific short story, and won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize in 2022.

Available to read on the Galley Beggar website, here. Collected in We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022

‘The Twelfth of Never’ by Gurnaik Johal

Unlike most narratives this one isn’t linked by characters or setting. It skips through time from one year to the next, beginning in 1741 and ending in 2020. Each snippet of the story is very brief. We hardly have time to get to know these people, before we are hurtling onwards through decades to the next fragment. The story begins with a butcher’s wife and ends with an old song discovered on Spotify. Like a puzzle, you can’t help searching for a pattern, a connecting thread. In the end you realise it’s about music. It’s the scale of the narrative that stays with you in the end.

First published in We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022