Of djinns, shakchunnis and shaitans of guilt

On the Brink of Belief: Queer Writing from South Asia, a collection of short stories and poems from the subcontinent edited by Kazim Ali, offers a living, breathing portrait of queer life across the region

- Siddharth Kapila

In the opening pages of On the Brink of Belief: Queer Writing from South Asia, a collection of short stories and poems by 24 underrepresented voices from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and India, I caught a flash of recognition.

In this anthology, born in The Queer Writers’ Room set up by The Queer Muslim Project (TQMP), editor Kasim Ali writes: “Perhaps it is only the queer person — perennially and by definition outside the mainstream of culture, politics and organised religion — who can know God.”

This observation echoes what I wrote in my own exploration of the Hindu faith: “I was undoubtedly an insider, but I was also an outsider in that I found myself outside the bounds of established convention.” That we both hold a specific gaze, of the outsider looking in or struggling to break free, is no coincidence. It is often the different ones — an euphemism frequently used for queer people — who grow into adulthood with an acutely developed sense for teasing out the codes designed to stifle our spirit. This is so even if we might, shaped by our parenting, retain aspects of tradition.

“Our queerness and Muslimness are not in conflict,” Kasim Ali rightly says. As the prose in this book shows us, “they are the frameworks through which we tell our stories, challenge assumptions and reimagine the world.”

In the book's first part, we encounter poems that reflect the queerness of the body and mind, mirroring too the loneliness of marginalised communities, as well as short stories that draw on hyper-local yet recognisable South Asian traditions, all reflecting a yearning for visibility, agency and love.