Life's little tragedies, comedies and ironies

Hindi journalist Anil Yadav's short fiction in translation throws light on corruption, hypocrisy and everyday absurdities in Varanasi, and beyond

- Aditya Mani Jha

If you’re Indian, you are in all likelihood familiar with the concept of double lives hidden in plain sight.

Due to the entrenchment of sociopolitical orthodoxies, people resort to the most comically transparent ruses. Your mother uses separate utensils for certain guests because she’s organised and fastidious. The lads from the mohalla are definitely not drinking away the chanda (donations) they collected for Durga Puja. And your widower uncle is simply a “well-wisher”, wink-wink, of the woman he visits like clockwork on weekend evenings. We Indians don't need narrative crutches like Santa Claus or storks dropping babies off—right from birth, we operate in far more sophisticated realms of hypocrisy and cultivated delusion.

The titular novella in Hindi journalist and writer Anil Yadav’s collection Courtesans don't Read Newspapers, titled Nagarvadhuyen Akhbar Nahi Padhtin, translated into English by Vaibhav Sharma, is a masterful, three-dimensional portrayal of one such realm. The setting in question is Varanasi, where a famously crooked cop named Ramashankar Tripathi is trying to sanitise his public image by driving the city’s sex workers out of Manduadih, the neighbourhood they've inhabited for several decades. Tripathi, widely believed to have killed his socialite wife Lovely years ago, is aided and abetted by a nexus of local politicians, real estate developers and compliant journalists skilled in the art of propaganda (especially of the religious persuasion).

To heighten the irony and the poignancy of the situation, Yadav narrates the action through a pair of young lovers, photojournalist Prakash and his girlfriend Chavi, who runs a beauty parlour. Their names are indicative of their respective narrative-symbolic purposes—