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Mridula Koshy and Janhavi Acharekar join Ahmad as they ride the changing tide in the publishing scene this year. Koshy’s intimate prose deals with a sense of discontinuity and reconnection with Delhi, the city she grew up in and left, only to return. “The short story offers a delicious moment of potency. It could be anything, and one need not spell out everything,” says Koshy. On afternoons when the kids are at school, Koshy, 38, snatches time to write her urban tales. Her collection, tentatively titled Stray Blades of Grass, will be published next month by Tranquebar, but Koshy says it has been a rather long wait. “Publishers don’t want to touch short stories. They think these don’t sell,” she rues.
V. Karthika of HarperCollins India agrees: “It’s true but ironic, considering the time people actually devote to reading. The marketing division has to rise to the occasion and aggressively recapture some of the readership that is now patronising novels.”
Mumbai-based Acharekar, 34, who describes her collection Window Seat (Rupa) as “fleeting glimpses of a society in transition”, too says short story needs PR. “We live incredibly fast-paced lives in cities. Short stories are a great way to capture personal insights and experiences,” says Acharekar, who wrote her stories on Mumbai locals. In spite of the fact that the short story is treated like a poor cousin of the novel, these three writers disagree. “We’ve grown up reading Maugham and O Henry and now there is Murakami,” says Ahmad. “Some stories are meant to be short and not a grand novel.” It’s been eight years since Jhumpa Lahiri’s grand debut with Interpreter of Maladies. Perhaps it is time for an encore.
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