“Have you ever been stung by a bee?” Anjali asked.
“Sure, a couple of times,” Rahul said. “Back in the village, papa built a big open tank next to the tube well in the field. We called it the hamam, and it was a lot of fun bathing in it during the summer.”
“Did you ever go in?” Anjali asked.
“Of course! During summer vacation I’d run down there at night with a bar of soap and a towel and jump in. It was great fun. Even the soap had a strong scent there that it doesn’t have here.”
“How’s that possible? Soap’s the same everywhere.”
“No, it’s not. In the forest, near the fields, and at night, soap smells more sweetly. It’s true,” Rahul said. “There were jasmine bushes growing next to the tank, and at night the blossoms smelled even more fragrant.”
“What are you talking about?” Anjali was getting a bit irritated. “First you were talking about the sweet smell of soap, and now jasmine?”
“Oh! You too. You’ll see if you ever go there. When I swim there at night, the soap and jasmine both smell sweet. Sometimes I feel like I’m washing myself with jasmine instead of soap. And sometimes I could swear soap bushes are growing next to the tank. But since you’ve never swum there at night, how could you have any idea?” Rahul was also getting a bit irritated.
“But you were talking about bees. What do they have to do with all this?” Anjali glared at Rahul.
“The bees are during the daytime. In the afternoon they hover around the water flowing near the tank—swarms of them. One afternoon when I went swimming, I hung my clothes and towel on the pipe of the tube well. A bee stung me when I started to dry myself off after I got out. They’d hidden in the towel.”

From “The Girl With the Golden Parasol,” by Hindi writer Uday Prakash, translated by Jason Grunebaum

Uday Prakash is someone I’ve written about before on this blog. He’s visiting the U.S. for a conference and I had lunch with him today. I asked him to tell me about younger writers who he has been reading, and he mentioned three names: Shilpi, especially her story (it’s a Hindi story with an English title) “Quality of Life,” my friend Asad Zaidi (who runs the Three Essays Collective), and Pawan Karan, one of whose ineptly translated poems I found linked here.

A few of Uday Prakash’s own poems, both in Hindi and in English translation, here.

uday-prakash