There are a few things that have kept us going through these times: Empathy, love, art. Now more than ever, we need to listen to the other and lose ourselves in a new story. Presenting a cross-section of the multiple diversities in India, the five novels on this year's JCB Prize for Literature shortlist speak in layered voices often laced with irony. Inventive and insightful in the way only literature can be, they create disparate worlds, each a microcosm with larger resonances and significance. The anguish of Kashmir, the turbulence of ethnic conflict in the northeast, the disharmony of lives spent in narrow social and psychological confines, each with their specific difficulties – the novels dive deep into these particular, ordinary lives and come up having discovered in them the extraordinary.
NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING
BY DARIBHA LYNDEM
On one occasion they shot Mr Arora, the car parts shop owner, who lived down the road from my grandmother. One evening as he was locking up at the end of the day, he was shot at close range just outside his shop. He died instantly. He left behind a wife and a young son. I overheard my family discussing that he had been killed because he had failed to pay the weekly 'fees' Saw Dak demanded of him. But a week later it was а found that he had in fact paid them, and there had been a mix-up. The group had shot a man who had paid for his safety. I always wondered if they felt any remorse.
This story is from the November 2021 edition of Grazia.
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This story is from the November 2021 edition of Grazia.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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