WHERE TO CARRY THE SOUND

Sudhakar’s collection of short stories melancholically reflects on loneliness, loss, and cultural decay.

The author here assembles nine short stories that are largely set in India and united tonally by an atmosphere of elegiac forlornness, a painful sense of all that is lost in shifting time. In the lead story, “Come Tomorrow,” Diya struggles with the recent death of her grandmother and her abandonment as a child by her mother. Now a professional photographer, she must come to grips with her mother’s absence and with her strange connection to her—her mother ran away with an artist, she learns. In “Empires Have Been Destroyed,” Ana runs an illegal speakeasy in her apartment in Bandra during the prohibition years, a “place that was not supposed to exist.” After Ana dismisses her bouncer Dinesh for an impropriety while in the company of her daughter Mari, Dinesh becomes deathly ill, accuses Ana of witchcraft, and instigates a police raid of her home that doesn’t turn up a scintilla of credible evidence. In both stories, the historical context suggests a culture in disrepair, especially considering parental responsibility—Mari’s father was an incorrigible alcoholic. “Marigolds,” the most experimental and haunting tale in this affecting collection, is written in the second person and artfully creates the unsettling illusion that the reader is being treated to a story about themself. “So yes, you crave the company of others. For sounds beyond the drafts whistling and howling through the house, its foundations audibly sinking and creaking beneath you. For a house made of something other than wind, which carries nothing you can hold.” The unnamed protagonist lives with her mother Gita “alone at the edge of the world” in a quiet redoubt by the sea. The protagonist finds a portal to another city by a different sea, and when she returns, she is all but unrecognizable to her mother. Sudhakar masterfully creates a mood in which anything feels possible, where magic lurks behind the quotidian. This assemblage of short fiction is emotionally enthralling and literarily inventive.

An impressively crafted set of short stories, thoughtful and poetic.