“Hell”

The coffee house was on the roof of a five-storey building.
They sat at a table facing each other, coffee cups between them.
“He’s written a bunch of crap again,” one said to the other, looking at him.
“He can’t write anything but crap,” added the other, forcefully.
“Have you read what he’s written?” asked the first, casually.
“No. Have you?”
“I don’t read trash written by trash,” the first one said as if he were delivering a film dialogue.
“And he’s so cheap!” added the other.
“He can’t be anything else but. By the way, has he ever been horrid like that with you?”
“How could he? I wouldn’t let anything less than the length of a cricket pitch come between him and me.”
Both remained silent for a while. The one said, “Yesterday I ran into the poet Kamal Kumar and Dr Tiwari. Both of them had this to say about him–they had never come across someone so cheap, either in real life or in books.”
The other thought a moment. Then he said, “By the way, be wary of Kamal Kumar. Pretending to be a poor man, he sneaks into your house like a rat and gnaws away at its foundation.”
“Oh, I know! And that Dr Tiwari is no less cheap himself. You saw how he wagged his tail that day!”
Both fell silent again. Their faces grew dark and serious.
After a long pause one said sadly, “How wretched the whole scene has become, hasn’t it?”
“Really yaar, which hell have we been trapped in?” the first said in an even sadder voice.
They looked at each other. Just as angels look at each other.
Then they smiled. Just as angels smile in hell.

From Uday Prakash, Short Shorts and Long Shots, stories translated from the original Hindi by Robert A. Hueckstedt and Amit Tripuraneni, and published by Katha. This collection includes the short-story “Paul Gomra and his Bajaj” which is perhaps one of the first, and best, examples of Indian writing on globalization. (By “globalization” I mean the cultural transformation under the New Economic Policy of the past decade and a half. For his commentary on the earlier form of globalization, which we also know as imperialism, read Uday Prakash’s short story “Warren Hastings and his Bull” in the same collection. Both stories are tinged by what has been called in another context “Hindi nationalism” but they are also protests. In fact, as I say in my blurb to the book, these stories “are fables about survival amid forces that have legislated extinction for all.”)

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