Editors’ Note – Issue 15 (Fiction)

Do walls speak? Can three untouchably powerful men actually lose, in Chidimma Ewelukwa’s Walls That Bleed — or does a house merely wait, the way houses do, for the one crack that lets everything it has swallowed come back out? Walls That Bleed uses sentence rhythm across various sections — the tabloid-satire sections run short and clipped, headline-style, while the Chinwe and Adaobi material lengthens and softens, so the prose itself marks the tonal shift between satire and grief. 

All that Matters by Anannya Nath makes you wonder whether the sentences run flat. Most of the story runs in long, clause-stacked sentences that don’t change gear much from one paragraph to the next; it is efficient short fiction. But then the powerful ending is hard-hitting in its brevity and the memorable scene with Dr Neog’s closed eyes and his recliner. It captures the contrast between the everydayness of bulldozer demolitions from a distance versus up close. 

What does a small town do with a widow’s one nightly cigarette? In Rahul Singh’s Bambaiyya Cigarette, a stub outside a stranger’s gate becomes the whole neighbourhood’s business — and she answers not with the confession everyone is waiting for, but by handing the evidence straight back to the man who found it, and letting it land, comically short, at his feet.

Whose voice gets to call you back from the dark? Sowmini S K’s The Voice That Called Him Back leaves a widower with paint on his clothes, no memory of the night before, and a son already telephoning around for a nurse — everyone around him deciding, gently, that grief is something to be managed and put away. Somewhere in the house, something else disagrees.

What are you prepared to give up? What can you not refuse?

Yours,
Rituparna and Smita