To celebrate the literary legacy of novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón, here are quotes from his Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle about reading and writing.

On June 19, 2020, the literary world got word that novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón had passed away from colon cancer at age 55. Now, a week later, I still can’t get this loss out of my head. I only started reading Zafón’s work last year (in the words of my favorite TV show, The West Wing, “Let’s forget the fact that [I’m] coming a little late to the party and embrace the fact that [I] showed up at all.”), but he quickly became one of my favorite writers.

His Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle is a brilliant collection of novels that all contain common characters and adjacent storylines, but you can read them in any order and discover a whole new take on the world Zafón created. This, in and of itself, was fascinating enough to draw me in, but to top it off, the underlying theme of the whole collection is the power of reading and writing. For the characters living in Spain during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, reading and writing were subversive acts that could land them in prison, or worse. And yet, the characters—bookstore owners, writers, and secret librarians—persist. In essence, if you love books—reading or writing them—these books are meant for you.

In celebration of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s contribution to the world of literature, here are a few quotes from two of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle.

From The Shadow of the Wind

“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”

“In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy them and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”

“…few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we leave behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”

“The book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn’t matter to anyone changed my life.”

From The Angel’s Game

“ A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.”

“…Bring me a story, not a speech. If I want a sermon, I’ll go to Midnight Mass. Bring me a story I have not read before and, if I have read it, bring it to me so well written and narrated that I won’t even notice.”

Order your copy of The Shadow of the Wind

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Order your copy of The Angel’s Game

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Order your copy of The Labyrinth of the Spirits

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Order your copy of The Prisoner of Heaven

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This post announces our latest From Our Readers question: What do you hope to achieve with your writing? Comment for a chance at publication in a future issue of Writer’s Digest.

This post announces our latest From Our Readers question: What do you hope to achieve with your writing? Comment for a chance at publication in a future issue of Writer’s Digest.

Our upcoming September/October issue is focused on the future and what the future might look like for writing and publishing. So we would love to know what you picture for yourself when considering your writing future.

Our formal question: What do you hope to achieve with your writing?

Are you trying to write a book? Do you want to get published? Make a living (or supplement your income) as a writer? Perhaps, you’re writing to help understand yourself or make people laugh. There are no right or wrong answers, because these are your aspirations. 

Share your answers with us in the comments below for a chance to be published in the September/October issue of Writer’s Digest.

Here are the guidelines:

• Provide an answer to the question “What do you hope to achieve with your writing?” in the comments below.
• Answers can be funny, weird, poignant, thought-provoking, entertaining, etc.
• Remember to include your name as you would like it to appear in print.
• Deadline for commenting this time around is July 6, 2020.
• Only comments shared below will be considered for publication, though feel free to share your answers on social media with the following hashtags: #WDReaders and #WritingAchievement.

Note on commenting: If you wish to comment on the site, go to Disqus to create a free new account, verify your account on this site below (one-time thing), and then comment away.

‘If I’d listened to you, we’d be dead by now’ my father told me as the coronovirus carried one peer of his after another to their grave. I had wanted him to stay in London in February, while coronavirus was still being downplayed by English politicians and their ‘special advisors’. Father had just retired from his radio station in Prague, and was visiting London with my mother – wouldn’t they like to spend more time with my wife and the kids? But they’d insisted on going back, saying something about renewing a contract on their apartment. In retrospect, it was a close shave. My wife and I, as well as our kids, succumbed to corona later that month. We must have been walking around with it for weeks before, little infection engines. One misplaced breath could have done for my parents. In Prague they were safer: lockdown had happened much earlier than in ruthless England.

My first job after recovering from the illness was to make a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the pandemic. I’d pitched it as an investigation into whether Covid-19 was bringing society together or driving us apart. The program was related to my research at the London School of Economics, where I investigate ‘polarisation’ and how to overcome it. The last few years had been defined by social divides around Brexit, pitching Remainers versus Brexiteers, which, when you look at the underlying polling, is very much a war between the generations: the elderly vote Brexit, the young Remain.

Making the program was more of a struggle than I’d anticipated. Even after the most intense coronavirus symptoms – fevers, panting, sweats, deliriums – had faded, I was still listless, and would lose focus halfway through interviews. The covid brain, starved of regular oxygen by crappy lungs, frazzles fast. One of the first successful interviews I managed was with the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, who detected elemental tensions in the relations between generations during Covid-19:

‘You have this notion in Freud that the band of brothers club together in some notional ancient time to kill the primal father. And then they are filled with remorse for it. And that remorse is the basis of repression which is the basis of civilisation. So civilisation is really about the internalisation of guilt at our aggression towards those we would like to topple or get out of the way. We become morally evolved by caring about the very people we feel this secret aggression towards.’

Cohen saw this logic playing out during the Covid-19 crisis – particularly around whether to pursue herd immunity, the idea that had been so popular in England at the start of the pandemic. ‘Part of the rhetoric was that it would be an efficient cull of the elderly and the infirmed and it wouldn’t affect anybody else,’ Cohen said. Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, discussed the herd immunity strategy in interviews with Sky News and the BBC, saying ‘our aim is to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely . . . to build up some kind of herd immunity’. Later, the Sunday Times would report that Boris Johnson’s chief political adviser, Dominic Cummings, had been overheard at parties describing the government’s strategy: ‘protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.’

But as the data began to show that far more people could potentially die, there was a turnaround. The government rowed back on the idea of herd immunity, claiming it was never part of their official strategy, and called the Cummings quotation a ‘highly defamatory fabrication’.

I asked Cohen what he made of all this.

‘We went from a kind of cavalier “it’s only the old and the infirm” to “we must protect the most vulnerable, most precious members of our society”. It was a massive leap in cultural attitude. An invocation of the remorse and guilt that comes around any intimation that aggression towards our parents is making its way into the public conversation.’

After our interview, I found myself thinking again about my parents visit, and the way I’d insisted they stay. Had there been some sort of Freudian urge underlying my desire to keep my mother and father in the UK?

My father certainly thought there was something in the idea that coronavirus showed children’s hidden instincts towards their parents. Back in Prague, he was writing poetry on the subject. He’s been a poet all his life, but his radio career had meant that he was only able to produce one book or so per year. Now, hemmed in between retirement and the plague, he was tinkling out a books’ worth in a month:

In the good old days
Children and virgins were offered as sacrifice.
How wise!
A civilisation should sacrifice its future,
Or else what’s the point of the sacrifice?
But these days
They come for us . . .
Do they think the Gods are blind?
Senile?
But here we stand on the sacrificial altar,
Shivering, sniveling, farting.
Can’t you tell that we’re useless?

Father had often joked that because he wrote in Russian, and I in English, we’d avoided having an outright father-son confrontation over literary territory. We had different languages to fill with our ambitions. Perhaps in order to avoid a collision I’d also swerved away into different genres: first television in contrast to his radio; then the plod of social science and very Anglo-Saxon, grounded reportage in contrast to his Russian poetic flights. Whenever I publish an article about politics and propaganda he always sighs and complains: please try to remember that deep down, you’re a poet.

For my father, poetry had been a way to rebel against the oppressive power he grew up under, the soviet system, which crushed the individual voice under the weight of ideology. In an early novella, written when he was twenty-seven and being interrogated by the KGB for handling censored literature, his fictional narrator, a young writer, discovers his own father’s imperial, impersonal, official writing and compares it with his own. The battle of ideologies is represented by another generational struggle.

First, the narrator’s father, in firm socialist style:

This country has thrown off the chains of Capitalist Slavery! Bourgeois culture was always far from the people! Now it has revealed its true face: the face of the maidservant of monopolistic capital! Welcome the Socialist Sun! Let the Darkness be gone!

And then we see the writing of my father’s narrator:

Just a minute ago you were walking the street, breathing in air and breathing out words; now you have burst through to the page, now it will pour out, like wild berries you’d been carrying inside your jacket. Is there any joy greater than writing in the first person?

Now, back in Prague, the quarantine and the closure of borders was giving my father Cold War flashbacks. And while Covid-19 was reducing life and death to statistics, father was again using literature to affirm individuality, a voice.

However much you try,
However much you hope,
You always end up as some set of statistic.
Homeowners or heterosexuals or failed writers.
How pointless these numbers are! What have statistics got to do with your life?
But now we have new sets:
The number of infected
(the counter is ticking)
The percentage of those infected who have died
(the counter is ticking)
The percentage of the dead over seventy
(the counter is ticking)

He was worried about my individual voice too, though not because of Covid-19.

When I told him about the radio program I was making for the BBC, he said, ‘Take care. You will end up sounding like a BBC person. They all sound the same. In your last program you sounded like an imitation of Andrew Marr. It’s horrific to hear you lose your voice this way.’

Radio, for father, has always been about the magic of the voice, the almost mystic properties of sound. My father had worked for the BBC himself, as a Soviet political refugee in the Russian Service during the height of the Cold War. At that time, sound was the only way to break through the physical walls and barbed wires of borders that had cut the world into different geopolitical zones. The rare phone calls he and mother had with their parents in the USSR took hours to arrange through a dispatcher, the secret services eavesdropping on every word. But barriers fell away when he entered the BBC radio studio; he felt himself piloting through censorship:

‘The hermetically sealed and soundproofed booths, the control panels, the lack of outside windows make radio studios like spaceships. And your voice alone is capable of unlocking this closed space. I am convinced that, as they sit by the radio, many listeners are on a voyage round the world, no, into outer space, more like. I too am a travel maniac: I jump from wave to wave.’

After decades in his spaceship studio he had come to see radio as a way of overcoming not only censorship, but death itself. The voices he recorded were immortal, once transmitted they travelled on infinite radio waves into the universe, like disembodied souls reverberating in the stratosphere. He once wrote a book of poems where the main character is a radio producer who goes mad thinking he can bring people back to life with the power of the wireless. In his ‘Covid Cycle’ he turned to radio once again as a metaphor of overcoming glum reality:

Only radio never shuts up during quarantine.
The world has become like a sunken submarine
Where a sailor inside needs to keep beating a hammer on the hull
Hoping to be heard upon the surface.

He imagines ‘a man, who looks a lot like me’ going around a spectral Prague with a magic Dictaphone which has the miraculous ability to record sounds that still existed before Covid-19: the tinkle of bottles in a bar; the whistle of skipping rope and squeak of swings at an empty playground

Back at the BBC, my own program was proving a more prosaic affair. It was, however, at least progressing, as I shrugged off the shortness of breath. Most of my interviewees were academics, who had conducted long, empirical, detailed experiments about how we can communicate with each other in a world no longer divided by physical barriers as in the Cold War, but by extreme polarisation, where people live in different social media ghettos of self-selected reality. Covid-19 now made those polarised divides a health risk – with groups tumbling into online worlds of wild conspiracies about the virus and quack cures.

Talia Stroud, a Professor of Communications at the University of Texas, told me about an experiment she had designed where you replace the ‘Like’ button on Facebook with a ‘Respect’ button. People in one political bubble were more likely to engage with content from the other tribe when they were asked whether they respected them, which was less a sign of partisan loyalty than ‘like’. Just a small tweak in the way a computer program creates metaphors for our emotions and relations could already change society.

Stroud had also experimented with how journalists can win trust from audiences convinced their claims to objectivity are a cover for their biases; that they are just ‘fake news’. One way was for journalists to reveal more about themselves when they present their content, welcome the audience into their process of composition. Trust levels could go up when journalists explain their personal background; how they collected the information; why the piece was commissioned. By revealing one’s subjectivity, you could have a more objective conversation. However, she lamented, as soon as you find one way of refreshing this relationship with the audience, it gets staid again, another set of clichés that again becomes a calcified wall between people.

One needs to be constantly finding new ways to break through; incessantly refreshing viewpoints that shake people out of their bubbles of identity. Only by constantly rewiring how we look at the world can one create enough movement to break through the barriers of seeing the world purely as ‘Democrats’ or ‘Republicans’, ‘Remainers’ and ‘Brexiteers’. Imagination, rather than fact-checking, is the path out of polarisation and, paradoxically, towards a shared reality.

I’ve spent the last few years of my life in a university building full of social scientists, trying to use polling and focus groups, data analysis and digital targeting to investigate whether a piece of content breaches the Berlin Walls of partisanship. It’s slow work, often worthy, but it only leads me back to how secondary sociology is to poetry in the project of reopening identity: poetry is the place where we experiment with changing ‘frames’ and points of view most radically.

While writing my last book I came across a PhD study that showed how the one thing that connected disparate Chinese people who did not accept government propaganda was that they had read fiction voraciously growing up: they could imagine a different way of experiencing the world to the one doled out by the CCP. It reminded me of my father in the Soviet Union, for whom poetry was a path to political rebellion, a way of changing ‘frames’ so radical it undermined the edifice of identity all around him. Perhaps poetry is the vaccine from the information virus.

Even today my father was still overturning perspective with every new poem he posted on his Facebook feed: he told the story of the virus from the point of view of rats undergoing vaccine experiments; of an information virus jealous of the coronavirus. He imagined trying to record the voice of the virus, bursting into a laboratory and breaking a test tube to gather its triumphant tones. Other poems satirised the quotidian. There was one about not being able to get through to a solicitor to make his will . . .

Or else I thought that was a poem – but then the next day he called and asked why I hadn’t gotten back to him. ‘Can’t you see we’re facing a crisis with how to plan for death?’ he asked me. I apologised and explained I’d read his post as poetry, rather than as a cry for help, confusing his regular voice with his poetic one. I said I would help source a solicitor in London as soon as my radio work allowed.

I asked a friend of mine, Devorah Baum, about how our relationship to our elders, or just the elderly, had shifted during Covid-19. ‘We have both put our parents onto a pedestal and protected them, but at the same time that protection and worship is a way of controlling them,’ she mused. ‘Now they are the helpless ones who, much like when we were infants, depend on us.’ We had gone from ‘herd immunity’ to protection, but that protection was also a form of control.

I wasn’t surprised to see that father’s latest poem was all about this new dynamic:

‘It’s cold. Steam comes out of her mouth.
The doctor says she has the Spanish Flu.
A shadow passes over my mother’s face. She’s dead.’

That’s by Mikhail Zoshenko.
But who will describe my cough?
Zoshenko’s mother was lucky.
Though –
Isn’t my son a writer too?
Yes – but the borders are closed.
He won’t be able to fly here
As they say, in good time.

It’s all very well thinking of radio as a metaphor to overcome death, but it’s children who guarantee immortality, and who are truly in power.

After I had finished my radio show, and it was released, my father messaged me. ‘I listened to your program. Very good. Your voice sounds personal. Born for radio by me.’ I told him I now felt fully recovered from Covid-19, and had been asked to make a new, ten-part series for the BBC. It had been nice to get away from the social science and just work on recording voices and storytelling. I felt at ease spending my days in the ‘spaceship’ of the studio: when Covid-19 has ruptured so many patterns, I felt like I was continuing my dad’s.

In Prague, his poetry seemed to have made peace with being made the sacrifice – or perhaps he was now playing with the idea that risk was a better fate that being controlled by his own children. I couldn’t tell.

It is good we are the prey.
We walk slowly. Sit in the sunshine. Pause in the window (without masks)
He doesn’t hurry. Aims. Wipes the sweat from his brow.
He takes pleasure in choosing who to hit and where:
In the sinuses, lungs, throat.
Yes it is good we are the prey.
Because if it were the children
Where would we hide them?
In the cellar? The loft?
We would shout: ‘I will tear your ear off if you dare peak out!’
And afterwards we would walk around with an ear in the hand:
That is not something you can just throw in the bin.

And this sniper is a sophisticated type.
He loves his job.
He shakes the moth balls from his suit.
Picks up a retro suitcase.
Comes round and rings the doorbell.
‘You have mice?’
‘No we have a cat. The cat catches the mice.’
‘What about Bats?’
And he just stands there quietly.
Refuses to leave.
While you hide the children in the pantry.
To summarise: we are lucky.
Let me open the window. Let him take aim.

After work at the BBC the other day I came home to find my own children, ten-year-old twins who haven’t seen a school room for two months, on a Zoom call with father. He’s been giving them lessons while school’s been off. Largely, he spends the time teaching them to write poetry. He thinks one, at least, may be a poet like himself.

 

Image © Dean Hochman

The post The Poetry Vaccine appeared first on Granta.

In partnership with Commonwealth Writers, Granta publishes the regional winners of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Kritika Pandey’s ‘The Great Indian Tee and Snakes’ is the winning entry from Asia.

 

The girl with the black bindi knows that she is not supposed to glance at the boy in the white skull cap but she does. The boy moves restlessly on a stool as he cradles a cup of chai in his hands. The girl has flavored it with cardamom for no extra cost before swallowing the leftover pod so her father won’t find out. He is the mustachioed owner who cleans his ears with Q-tips at the cash counter. The girl looks up from the boiling contents of the saucepan, pretending to notice new customers while examining the contours of the boy’s stubbly chin, the kite-shaped birthmark on his neck. He mostly watches the speeding vehicles on the road. Once in a while, he meets her gaze and his ears turn crimson. At such moments the girl and the boy realize that they must immediately look away but never stop noticing each other wherever they go.

 

*

 

It is September. Hawkers appear with baskets of tomatoes. They are overpriced but surprisingly red. The girl’s father asks her to buy two kilos. They would keep tomato chutney on the menu until tomatoes become wholly unaffordable in the winter. She squats at the water pump outside the stall to wash the tomatoes, facing the boy, gazing at the stubbed toe sticking out of his sandals. He is one of the few customers who prefer eating keema samosas to aloo samosas but it is the least of the girl’s concerns. Their stuffings are somewhat different but the girl makes both types of samosas with the exact same batter. They are the same thing unless one absolutely wants to differentiate, which most people do, including the girl’s father who has strictly warned her against eating keema samosas.

A chilly breeze leaves the girl covered in goosebumps.

‘Why does it have to get cold?’ She says to no one in particular.

‘Seasons change,’ says one of the men sitting next to the boy. They are daily wage laborers who ask for aloo samosas with their chai, not keema samosas, never keema samosas. They carry grimy shovels and miss no opportunity to talk.

‘Because this is how it is.’

‘Because this is how it’s always been.’

‘Because the earth moves around the sun,’ says the boy.

The girl breathlessly punctures a tomato, then washes the red mush off her fingernails. She has never heard him speak before.

A man eyes the monogram on the boy’s shirt. ‘Go to school?’

He nods yes.

The girl’s father had pulled her out of school after a couple from Class 10 eloped to Bombay.

The man chuckles. ‘I went to school myself. Now I shovel cement and sand.’

Later that night, the girl can’t stop wondering if the earth really moves around the sun. Why had no one told her that? Who was making it move? She sits up in bed and thinks about endless fields of cauliflower and tries not to throw up, like she has to do on the Giant Wheel at the funfair. Dreams take over when she falls asleep. She grabs the boy’s stubbed toe as they fly off the face of the earth.

 

*

 

The town is on a plateau formed by colliding land masses when the dinosaurs were still around. It is big enough to have a Domino’s but too small for traffic lights. The traffic policemen take breaks from signaling vehicles to rub lime and tobacco in the palms of their hands until drivers yell at them to regain control. The girl’s father had moved here when growing onions in the village farmlands stopped being profitable. It was raining less and less each year. For a while, he tried to find work at the department store with glass walls, live in a house with bedrooms. Then he gave up. He got bamboo sticks and tarpaulin and set up the stall outside their shack. It unsettled him to include keema samosas on the menu but he wanted to make whatever profit he could. A painter demanded rupees 500 for adorning the aluminium anterior of the table where the chai was prepared on a coal stove. ‘It better be a nice and important name,’ the girl’s father had told the painter, who could hardly spell, and so the tea and snacks stall was christened The Great Indian Tee and Snakes. The painter had promised, ‘Anyone who loves this country will love this name.’ Some passersby point out the sign to each other and have a good laugh. Others nod in admiration of what they take to be high literary nonsense. Many click pictures.

 

*

 

The girl is frying samosas. Today the boy is being questioned by the men with grimy shovels about what brings him to this part of town every weekend.

‘I water an old man’s geraniums,’ he says.

‘Gera-what?’

‘Flowers.’

Thanks to the laborers’ interest in him, the girl can now hear the boy talk.

‘Germium,’ she says to a golden samosa floating in the oil, pleased that the boy knows such words. Her father glares at her. She sighs. If only she were allowed to talk to the boy, she wouldn’t have to talk to the samosas.

‘Pays well?’ A laborer asks.

‘600 per month,’ says the boy.

‘For watering flowers!’

‘Kya kismat hai.’

‘Lucky bastard.’

The boy says that his wealthy employer lives by himself and reads magazines with high-definition photographs of wild felines. When someone brings up the new prime minister’s yoga moves, the boy silently nibbles on his samosa. The girl mumbles things that she wishes to say aloud to him.

‘Plants make their own food. I know because I used to go to school as well . . . I also know that we can’t see air but it’s there . . . Do you like summer or winter? I like summer for the mangoes. I don’t like winter because the cold makes me feel more feelings . . . I don’t care if you eat this samosa or that samosa. Just saying. People should eat whatever they want to. Why is it a big deal? . . . You have nice fingers, you know . . . Every morning, some men gather in the park with Gandhi’s statue and force themselves to laugh. If you look at them, they’ll make you laugh too. They say it makes you happy . . . You have really nice fingers . . . Do you like me?’

 

*

 

The girl’s father wants the boy to be served chai in stainless steel cups only. If the girl mistakenly serves him in ceramic, her father waits for the customers to leave, then smashes the cup. ‘Steel can be washed with soap and water,’ he says, ‘But you can’t wash a keema-eater’s saliva off of clay.’ The girl used to follow her father’s orders and throw away the ceramic pieces. But now she collects them as if they are artifacts. When her father is snoring at night, she steps out of the house, glues back the broken cups under the streetlight, and hides them among the tangled roots of a Banyan tree.

 

*

 

The girl believes that her father is kinder than he appears to be. He could have tossed her into the river after discovering that she was not a boy but he did not. Not even after her mother, his wife, died a week later from excessive bleeding. The girl obviously doesn’t like that he expects her to be up around five in the morning to open the stall, calling her the ‘Queen of England’ when she sleeps in. However, he lets her spend on nail polish and newspapers from which she cuts out pictures of the oval-faced woman with shimmery eyelids. The man at the newspaper stand says that her name is Beyoncé. The customers at the stall eat samosas from scraps of newspaper with Beyoncé-shaped holes in them.

At times when the girl gets a bridal mehndi assignment – she is a decent henna artist – her father takes care of the stall so she can spend hours painting the hands of brides. She hides the names of their future husbands amid swirly, intricate henna patterns.

Nevertheless, as far as the keema-eater is concerned, the girl must not get ahead of herself. Her father doesn’t need to tell her that girls with black bindis are not supposed to feel this way about boys in white skull caps. She knows.

 

*

 

The girl wakes up with cold toes. She gathers twigs, leaves, bits of paper, cloth and empty Lipton cartons before setting them on fire. Her father fans the flames. The girl, the boy, four of the laborers and the girl’s father sit around the fire with their chai, yawning. Sun rays are trapped in fog. The morning feels like evening. The unbroken-broken cups hidden among the Banyan’s roots must be covered in frost, the girl thinks, wondering if she should show them to the boy. But what if he has a girlfriend at school? What if he has held her hand? When a laborer coughs, the boy says that his mother coughs all the time. Something is wrong with her lungs.

‘I’ll become a doctor and treat her,’ he adds.

‘Treat us also,’ jokes the laborer.

The boy smiles. ‘I will.’

The chai has finally awakened the men. They won’t stop talking now.

‘People should be able to become whoever they want to be.’

‘But the problem is that there are too many people.’

‘And too few things one can become.’

‘And fewer things one can sell to buy rice.’

Their laughter is followed by silence.

‘I want to become Beyoncé,’ the girl says.

‘Who?’

 

*

 

The new prime minister’s face is everywhere. On telephone poles and park benches and garbage cans and the back of cars and even on the faces of so many people who wear masks of his face with tiny holes for eyes. The girl doesn’t know how his face appeared on the water pump outside the stall. Sometimes she is unable to flavor the boy’s chai with cardamom for the fear of the prime minister watching her. Other times she skips the cardamom because, for all she knows, the boy doesn’t even care.

 

*

 

The Great Indian Tee and Snakes is out of sugar. The girl walks to the grocery store. Tiny rocks push into the soles of her feet through the cracks in her chappals. Once she had stolen a pair of cat-printed chappals from outside the temple, but they have been lying under her bed ever since. She worries that the owner may spot them and take them away.

The grocer is an old man who is partially deaf. The TV in the store needs to be pounded from time to time to keep the images from splintering. The place is packed during the cricket season when people stop by to watch an over or two, praise or curse Dhoni. After purchasing the sugar, the girl is too caught up watching on TV the magnified insides of somebody’s mouth being cleansed by a toothpaste that tastes like turmeric to notice when the boy appears next to her. He asks the man for chewing gum.

‘Hey,’ he says to the girl.

‘Oh, hi.’

The boy is standing right next to her in a place where her father’s gaze is not upon them. She can touch the kite-shaped birthmark on that neck if she wants to. The man has left a pack of gum on the counter before returning his attention to the TV.

‘Nice to see you outside the stall, for a change,’ the boy says.

‘Same.’

‘You’ll make a good Beyoncé. Probably better than Beyoncé herself.’

The girl touches her bindi, smiling, telling herself that she was wrong about the boy having a girlfriend at school. ‘Won’t you offer me chewing gum?’

‘Absolutely.’

The girl chews the gum until it’s time to go to bed, then she swallows it.

 

*

 

The girl examines ordinary objects with newfound fascination – a matchbox, a potato, freight trucks on the road, the ground beneath her feet – thinking that nothing is bigger or smaller than it should be. Everything is the perfect size. She air-dries her shampooed hair in the afternoon sun instead of twisting it up in a towel. She wonders if this is how girls become women. One night when she is putting a broken cup back together, soiled with the keema-eater’s saliva, blood gushes out of her finger like water from the pump. Nevertheless, unlike the brides whose hands she paints with henna, she feels no need for a husband and a house and a washing machine and a baby and a mixer grinder to be content. All she needs is for the boy in the white skull cap to drink chai and eat samosas at the stall so she can watch him watch her.

 

*

 

The laborers are talking about an upcoming cinema hall in town that will play three movies at once. The boy is eating a keema samosa, waiting for his chai. Around a dozen young men with saffron bandanas arrive on motorbikes. They order chai and aloo samosas. The girl’s father tells them to leave because they never pay.

‘This isn’t a wedding you can crash anytime,’ he says.

‘Don’t be so touchy now,’ says a young man. His T-shirt is just as saffron as his bandana. He looks like a carrot.

‘Extra spicy samosas, please,’ another young man tells the girl.

When the girl’s father stands up to protest, the young man who looks like a carrot pushes him into his chair before noticing that his companions are still struggling to park their motorbikes.

‘Who the fuck left this bicycle here?’ He hollers.

‘It’s mine,’ says the boy in the white skull cap. He starts moving his bicycle but the young man stops him.

‘You think this is the fucking Olympics?’

‘I am sorry. I’ll move it.’

‘Sorry won’t do. Say, “chai is great”.’

‘Haan?’

‘Say it.’

‘Chai . . . chai is . . .’

‘You don’t like chai?’

‘I drink it every day.’

‘So say it! ‘Chai is great’!’

‘Chai is . . . great.’

The girl whips the batter slowly. She would poison the samosas if she could.

‘Good. Now pick up your disgusting samosa and throw it away.’

‘What?’

‘You deaf?’

‘No more keema samosas for you,’ says another young man. ‘Only aloo samosas from now.’

‘But I like keema samosas,’ says the boy.

The young man who looks like a carrot slaps him. The girl stops whipping the batter.

‘Throw your samosa away or we’ll boil you with the chai.’

The boy does as he is told.

The young man takes off his saffron bandana before handing it over to the boy. ‘Now get rid of that dumb skull cap and put this on.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You won’t?’

This time the boy looks into the young man’s eyes.

‘I will not do that.’

The young men beat up the boy, calling him a fucking keema-eater, asking him to go back to his keema-country, as one of them makes a video on his phone. The girl’s father and some of the laborers try to intervene unsuccessfully. The girl begs the men to let the boy go. ‘All he does is water flowers!’ she screams. Nobody listens. A couple of laborers join in after some time, calling the boy names, thrusting their shovels into his stomach. ‘But he is going to become a doctor and treat you!’ The girl pleads. ‘How could you forget?’ Her father yells at her to go into the house. The boy looks like a punctured tomato and dies.

 

*

 

December is almost over. The girl with the black bindi weeps when she is cold. She cannot stand straight. She cannot hold her head high. She cannot feel her nose. When her father wakes her up in the mornings, she turns her back towards him. ‘No,’ she says. She sneaks out keema samosas from the stall before eating them hidden behind the kangaroo-shaped trash cans at the park. She has never eaten anything with keema before. It tastes like tears until she realizes that she needs to stop crying while eating. After that, it tastes like food. Newspapers carry front-page pictures of the boy in the white skull cap, sitting against a plain grey background, in even lighting, unsmiling, but alive. He looks straight at her. Now, instead of Beyoncé’s pictures, the girl cuts out every picture of the boy from every paper before burying them under her mattress. She wipes the frost off the unbroken-broken cups under the Banyan tree.

 

*

 

When the wedding season arrives, the girl has too many henna assignments and not enough time to grieve. The brides talk while getting their hands painted because the girl listens. One of the brides points to a picture on the wall. Her fiancé is holding the Taj Mahal in the palm of his hands. Another bride tells the girl that her fiancé’s name is Adithya with an H. She wants his name on both her hands, front, and back. Another requests her to feed her chocolate after her hands are covered in mehndi. Yet another suggests the girl play hard-to-get if she ever wants her boyfriend to propose for marriage. ‘Love requires you to be something of an asshole,’ she says. And yet another woman looks uninterested in all such matters despite her Banarasi saree and eye makeup, despite the jasmine flowers in her hair, as she spreads her hands before the girl. She doesn’t even remember her fiancé’s name. The girl tells her that it doesn’t seem like she wants to get married.

‘I don’t.’

‘What do you want to do then?’

‘Paint pictures of the sky.’

‘You can do that even if you’re married.’

‘I can do that even if I’m not.’

‘But why the sky?’

‘Because it is infinite.’

 

*

 

Newspapers are covered in pictures of a high-speed train by the time the weddings are over. There’s a nationwide ban on keema samosas, keema naan, keema parathas, keema pakoras and, basically, keema everything. The girl loiters in the park with Gandhi’s statue.

In the mornings, a group of men stand in a circle and force themselves to laugh. They are loud and self-assured, the type that eat aloo samosas. At first, they go, ‘Ho-ho, ha-ha, ho-ho, ha-ha’. Before long, however, they are laughing uproariously, teeth bared, arms raised in the air. The girl wonders if they had seen the front-page pictures of the boy in the white skull cap. In the evening, young men and women take too many selfies against the fountain. The young women wear lipstick, the young men have their hair sticking up. Their faces change when they point their phone cameras towards themselves. The girl wonders if they have ever tasted a keema samosa.

Men in blue uniforms water the plants in the park. One of them is watering a bed of flowers. The petals are more purple on the inside than the outside. She walks up to him.

‘Sir, are these germiums?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Are these germium flowers?’

‘There are no flowers by that name.’

She walks up to another man who is watering potted yellow flowers with long, spaced-out petals, and repeats the question.

‘No,’ he says, ‘but nice tits.’

 

*

 

The girl sits on a park bench and tries to fall in love again. She tries to fall in love with the boy in an oversized T-shirt who is kicking a football, or the one who is doing push-ups, or the young man with the shocking blue earphones, walking with his hands in his pockets, or the boy who is holding hands with a girl who has streaks of red hair, or the one lying on his stomach, reading a book, or maybe even the one who is ogling at the women practicing yoga. Nothing happens.

Then she lies on her back and stares at the infinite sky. She hopes the woman who didn’t remember her fiancé’s name is painting as many pictures of the sky as she wants to. But infinity is not the girl’s type. She needs something more measurable than that, something smaller than the sky but bigger than a samosa.

 

*

 

It is a pleasant April morning. The men who force themselves to laugh are laughing like there’s no tomorrow. One of them notices the girl sitting by herself and invites her to join them. ‘Guaranteed to make you happy,’ he says. She reluctantly accepts. In the beginning, she stands there, wanting to disappear. Then, encouraged by the men, she smiles a small, confused smile. Then she laughs softly because everyone else is laughing. For a few minutes, it feels insincere, but after that, she is actually laughing aloud. She bookmarks this as an important skill.

A man turns to her when it’s over.

‘So, young lady, are you happy now?’

She looks at the beads of sweat on his forehead, laughter lines around his mouth.

‘Are you?’ she asks.

 

The overall winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020 will be announced during a special award ceremony which will be broadcast online at 1pm BST on 30 June 2020. See here for further details.

Image © Cishore

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