Pot of plots

Tales from the Andhra coast deck out a fun- filled rainbow banner

- FAIZAL KHAN

TELUGU WRITER MOHAMMED Khadeer Babu swears his literary allegiance to a small town in Andhra Pradesh. It is Babu’s home town, called Kavali. Nearly a decade ago, he published a bouquet of stories about Kavali in Telugu. Babu’s tales about his fascinating town are now available in an English translation, titled That’sa Fire Ant Right Right There.

Divided into two parts, to equally share the author’s sentiments for his family and friends, the collection of a whopping 50 short stories from his childhood narrates life in a coastal town in the ’90s when the country was slowly beginning to make forceful new changes in the economic, political and social milieu. Babu tells tales of his home and around in a straightforward manner. The home is that of an ordinary Muslim family. The father is an electrician, the mother, a homemaker. They have four children. The father’s mother completes the family. The ordinariness of an Indian family is always complicated like that of the country. Babu’s stories confirm that it doesn’t matter whether the family is Muslim or Hindu, Sikh or Christian. It is still complicated.