Setting: Interior Landscapes

There are interior landscapes among us that are badly in need of just the kind of rewilding that ecologists are calling for in the real world. In this context, it’s worth remembering that the Indian subcontinent, like the planet itself, is shared space.

A couple of years ago, right around the first uneasy rumbles of the Covid pandemic, I received a request for a short story from Sehyr Mirza, a Pakistani creative writer and journalist who was planning to edit an anthology of short stories for young readers. Here is the ethereal jacket image now created by Priya Kuriyan for that anthology, The Other in the Mirror: Stories From India and Pakistan, coming soon from Yoda Press in India and Folio Books in Pakistan! Priya Kuriyan, by the way, was the artist who illustrated the delicious Indian edition of my own Book Uncle and Me.

Back in 2020, this is what Sehyr wrote to me:

The larger goal of the project is to sensitize young people in India and Pakistan through storybook sessions by imbibing in them values of non violence, pluralism, and cohesion…. I am requesting your contribution in the form of a freshly written, unpublished short story in English. I'd be really obliged if you agree to contribute to an important cause.

Nonviolence, pluralism, cohesion—they sounded like laudable goals, if on the utopian side, so of course I said I’d be interested. Which didn’t mean I had a freshly written story handy, nothing like that. Still, anything to push back against hate for its own sake, which is kind of where we seemed to be then—as now, for that matter.

Over the months of the pandemic’s deepening, amid ever-worsening news of what humans have done and continue to do to the planet, a short story crept into my mind. It began with a setting, an arid salt-flat in a near future borderland where buffalo herders, Hindus and Muslims who have lived and worked together for centuries, push back against threats to the sanctity of their borderless homeland. That landscape came in part from my filmmaker friends Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar whose marvellous documentaries follow the lives of musicians and herders in the borderlands of the Rann of Kutch. These were the threads of religious diversity, syncretism, and love of the other that I was reaching for. What I needed to do was transport them into an imagined future and embody them in the life and aspirations of a girl coming of age in that space.

I can’t wait to see how this landscape fits the jigsaw puzzle of this book, with contributions by authors and translators including Gulzar, Asghar Wajahat, Mirza Hamid Baig, Rakhshanda Jalil, Anirudh Kala, Nina Sabnani, Ranjit Lal, Saaz Aggarwal, Shreya Sen Handley, Dush Yant, Saeed Ahmed, Muhammad Atif Aleem, Anushka Ravishankar, Amra Alam, Priyanka Sarkar, Maaz Bin Bilal, Bina Biswas and others.

Part of Kahani Project, which says of this collection:

'The Other in the Mirror' is a rare literary anthology, featuring twenty authors from India and Pakistan, with stories that bring warmth to the barren inner lands that have remained frozen since partition.