Rajendra Yadav -राजेन्द्र यादव- "Two In the Next World"

"Two In the Next World" by Rajendra Yadav-राजेन्द्र यादव-(1958, 2 pages-trans. in 2006)

Medical Corruption

A Story by an Eminent Hindi Author

"Two in the Next World" by Rajendra Yadav is a starkly realistic look at how medicine is practiced (or was in 1958) in the North  Eastern India.   Yadav (1929-Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India) comes from a very distinguished family that traces its origins back 1000s of years.   He was born into a Maratha caste many of whose members are government officials, land owners, and army officers.   His own father was a medical doctor.   Yadav studied Hindi literature in college and began to publish short stories and essays while still in college.   He has written several novels, one of which in the 1960s sold over a million copies.   He edited a prominent literary journal.   His wife, Mannu Bhandari, is also a well known author.   He has translated Russian and French literary works into Hindi.  

"Two in the Next World" is narrated from Hell by a man who died as a result of surgery by an incompetent doctor.   He was scheduled to have his surgery done by a government doctor but he found out the doctor was "a reserve quota doctor" meaning he came from once discriminated castes (Dalit or untouchables) which in the mind of the man telling the story that the doctor was just given his degree no matter how stupid he might have been to satisfy government quota requirements that there must be a certain number of Dalit doctors.   Instead he takes all of his families spare cash and hires a young very professional looking doctor right out of medical school.   It turns out the doctor got through school by bribes and passed his medical exams in the same way.    The narrator is now in what he thinks is hell.   He says he will look up the second wife of the doctor that killed him as she killed herself when her family could not give her husband all the money he demanded from them.


"Two in the Next World" (the man and the doctor's second wife) is a simple tale about a world where it is just natural that doctors are all either corrupt, incompetent or uncaring.   It is just how life is!   


The story was translated from Hindi by Pratik Kanjilal.




Mel u

"Scorn" by Bama Faustina -leading woman Dalit Tamil Author

"Scorn" by Bama Faustina (2004, 3 pages, in translation from Tamil)

Caste Discrimination in Elementary Schools

A Story by a Leading Dalit Author

Bama Faustina is one of the first Dalit Tamil writers to achieve international attention for her work.   I confess I did not know what the word "Dalit" means when I first encountered it.   A Dalit person is one whose ancestors were members of discriminated against castes.    The Indian government has classified about ten percent of the populace of India as being of Dalit descent.   (The common western parlance for this   is "untouchable".)    Caste discrimination is illegal in Indian but it is still very widely practiced, especially in rural areas.   Members of Dalit castes by practice and custom live among themselves and face great prejudice.    There are 3000 plus recognized castes, 49 of them are considered Dalit castes.   

Seventy five percent of Christians in India are of Dalit caste background.  When Christian missionaries first entered India, they had their best success among the poorest of people, the untouchables.   I know this is a very complicated and sensitive issue which many prefer to sweep under the rug, but writers like Bama Faustina are bringing international focus on the problems of Dalits.    Oxford University Press has published translations of her novels and she has also published a successful collection of short stories.   She is a teacher in Uthiramerur.   She is a Roman Catholic (75 percent of Roman Catholics in India are of Dalit background.)

"Scorn" opens with a child and his mother arguing.   The boy, he seems about 10, does not want to go to school today.   He wants to go into the forest with his mother who works as a charcoal maker (once a very common occupation for members of Dalit castes in a country where most people still cook on charcoal).      His mother tells him that she and her father are working very hard and sacrificing to send him to school so he will not have to be a street sweeper, a charcoal cleaner,  or house boy.   She wants to know why he does not want to go and he will not give her a straight clear answer.   She finds out from her neighbors (everybody on her street are Dalits) that he was beaten by higher caste children at school because he forgot his lunch box and ate food  (with permission) from the lunch  box of a higher caste child.   When he went to complain to the teacher, the teacher beat him and said he is  was just an ignorant Dalit that does not even know the customs of his country.   

The next day the mother and the boy's father go to the school.   The father was terribly upset by what happens.    He accepts that he has always been treated as the lowest type of person by accident of his birth but he will not accept this as the fate of his son.

The next day the parents go to the head master of the school to complain.   They are told that what happened to their son is their fault.   If they had only taught him his place in life this would never have happened.     The parents begin to talk to other parents on their street.   They find out that one time money was missing and they searched only the Dalit Children.     The headmaster even tells them that the Dalit children at school are always assigned clean up duties as cleaning up after their betters is part of their heritage.   The headmaster tries to be nice about this and says, meaning it as a compliment, "Well the children from your street are just naturally made for clean up work".      Here is how one teacher explained it all to the  head master:


"Kattari ran and hugged his father and started crying. Meanwhile, a teacher came to the headmaster and said something to him. At once the headmaster told the headman of his street, “Let them be. Why should you beat a dog and earn the burden of sin? Why do you want to deal with them at all? Just touch these people and they’ll make trouble. These people are not like they used to be. Let them be.”


One of the very saddest aspects of discrimination is that children of discriminated groups begin to believe it is true.   There are even terrible TV commercials run here in the Philippines (by big international companies) selling skin whiting cream for early teenage girls.   


"Scorn" is a simple story that puts a whole world in a few pages.   It was translated from Tamil by Sarsa Rajagopal).     I suspect it took real courage to write it.   For sure it is worth the minute or two it will take you to read it.


You can read it online at The Little Magazine.


Mel u 

Uma Varatharajan-Sri Lanka-"The Advent of the King"

"The Advent of the King" by Uma Varatharajan (2002, 2 pages)

A Parable of the Sri Lankan Civil War

Uma Varatharajan is one of leading contemporary authors of Sri Lanka.   His work is very concerned with the human costs of the Sri Lankan civil war.   The war (1983 to 2009) cost the lives of 1000s of innocent citizens and displaced millions.    It caused a diaspora of much of the more elite elements of the population.   (There is an informative article HERE which provides a good explanation of  the history, causes and terrible effects of the conflict.)

"The Avent of the King" is set in the far distant past of Sri Lanka.   It has two central figures.   One is Uumayan, a simple man whose strongest concern in life is to take care of his elderly mother.   The second is a king who has just triumphed in putting down a revolt on part of the island.   The story is said to be a parable of the last 18 months of the life of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, killed in  a suicide attack.   (The war was partially over what languages should be dominant.)

It is a big day in Uumayan's home town.   The king is coming to announce he is going to have a temple that was destroyed in the war rebuilt.   This is to show his great love for his people.   The war has been over for a while but the memories do not fade.

"The city stood on the banks of the Red River, lined by groves of bamboo, quick to catch fire from the smallest spark borne by the slightest breeze. Though the war had ended three years ago, the sound of trumpeting elephants, neighing horses, the clash of steel and the piteous cries of people could be heard even to this day. The stench of burning bodies still hung suspended in the air. Vultures had abandoned their eyries in the jungles nearby and flocked to the city in the wake of the army and roosted among the giant trees, anticipating another conflict. Blackened walls and houses with their roofs caved in revealed how this once beautiful city was ravaged by war. The silence of the night was disturbed by the constant hooting of birds of evil omen and the howling of dogs. "

As you can see, Varatharajan has a very powerful visually oriented narrative style.

Uumayan can barely speak.   He was beaten by soldiers for the weakest of reasons (he owned a razor which was a crime) and lost his voice in this episode.   All he really cares about in life is taking care of his mother.     He has lost hope of one day having his own family as no potential father in law would permit his daughter to marry a man with little money who can barely speak.   

One day troops come in and take many of the men of the town to jail.   They are to be kept there so they can be released to be an audience for the king's dedication of the new temple.   

As the king speaks, a much needed rain begins to fall.   The king says he has brought the rain for his people.   He asks them what else they would like him to do for them.   The crowd, watched over by the soldiers, sang a song in praise of the king just as they had for other kings.   

The ending of this story is very powerful (somehow it takes on more power with the events of yesterday).

"“I am honoured and flattered to see you here in your thousands to welcome me in spite of the heavy rains. What do you need from me? Speak up!” said the King.

Uumayan once again raised his eyes heavenwards. There was no sign of the rain abating. Rather, forks of lightning flashed and snaked across the sky, followed by loud thunderclaps. The waters swirled and eddied and surged along the earth, creating new watercourses.

“I’ll build you mansions. I’ll order the immediate repair of roads, the restoration of tanks… Do you need stadiums, grain, silk? Ask, I am prepared to give you all these and more, but never…”

Before the King could complete his sentence, a blinding flash of lightning linked earth and sky. Uumayan closed his eyes in fear. When he opened them again and looked at the stage, the king was not there any more, he had vanished mysteriously."

You can read this story in The Little Magazine.   It is in translation from Tamil.

This is my first posting on a work by a Sri Lankan author.    There is a  great tradition in the literature of Sri Lanka (Leonard Woolf was a colonial administrator back in the time when it was part of the British Empire and was known as "Ceylon"-unlike most, he made a deep study of the culture of the country) for short stories.   


I hope those with direct experiences of the matters mentioned in this post will leave a comment.   


I am but in the opening stages of The Reading Life South Asia Short Story Project.   The history of this region is delightfully rich and complicated and is opening up a giant new world of learning and reading for me.   I expect to pursue it as a permanent interest.   I already have links to 100s of short stories by an incredibly diverse range of authors.     As one goes further back in history, there are fewer female authors and the authors  come mainly  affluent families.    Most of the authors whose works I have so far read, are highly educated both formally and through a life long pursuit of the reading life.    


Mel u

"Nagapushpam" by Kannan Lakshmi-leading Tamil author

"Nagapushpam" by Kannan Lakshmi (2003, 3 pages)

Female Infanticide

"There is a little-known battle for survival going in some parts of the world. Those at risk are baby girls, and the casualties are in the millions each year. The weapons being used against them are prenatal sex selection, abortion and female infanticide — the systematic killing of girls soon after they are born.

According to a recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of the World Population Report, these practices, combined with neglect, have resulted in at least 60 million "missing" girls in Asia, creating gender imbalances and other serious problems that experts say will have far reaching consequences for years to come."-from UNESCO 

"Nagapushpan" by Kannan Lakshmi-Chennai, India) is a beautifully told 

story that deals directly with a terrible evil, the practice of female infanticide in India.   An estimated minimum 500,000 female babies are killed at birth (mostly in rural India) every year.    The practice is illegal but no one is arrested for it.  

As the story opens, a young girl from a wealthy family is hiding up in a tree.  She is sulking because she is demanding that nagapushpan flowers be used in a celebratory event her family will soon sponsor.    Her mother tells her this cannot be as once years ago her family brought one of these flowers into the house at it attracted a poisonous snake that killed  a  young female child.   "Naga" means snake and has deep roots in the cosmology and culture of South Asia.   The image of giant snakes are all over the temples of South Asia.   

As the girl gets older she wonders why her parents gave her a name that seem to honor the snake (the naga is most often depicted on temple carvings as a hooded cobra), "Nagapanchami".    One day her mother tells her she is old enough to go with the women to the temple for a special occasion.   There is a lot to be learned in this story about Indian culture.   The scene in the temple had to be very confusing for the girl.   Her mother, her grandmother and many other women are giving ambulations to stone statues of snakes.   The pour milk over them.   They walk around the statues until they  collapse in exhaustion

These snakes have a special function in the lives of all women (no need to get too Freudian!).   I will let the story tell itself.

"The snakes functioned by taking on different forms and shapes. They got into the delicate spinal cord of the newborn Nagaratnas, bent it backward and snapped it, helping the midwife kill the female baby. The snakes transformed themselves into ropes, twined around the neck of the tender, young female infant and strangled her. Or they turned into a large, black rock salt, blocked the mouth of a baby till she struggled for breath and choked to death. They even metamorphosed into fertiliser and finished their mission by poisoning the baby. They changed into various forms. They became ropy dough that was coiled around the lid of the large earthen pitcher to seal off all air. The female infant stuffed inside struggled for breath. Slowly, very slowly indeed, they granted freedom to the female soul that was trapped inside the pitcher and helped the midwife again in snuffing out the young life.

The snakes also entered the bodies of husbands whose wives protested against the killing of their baby daughters and who sobbed and screamed. The snakes made the husbands hiss in fury and spread out their hood. They slithered into the strong, muscular arms of these fathers of tiny daughters, helped them fling their own infants against the walls of the saurighar till the tender young brains spilled out. Snakes and more snakes. Venomous snakes, wherever you looked."

As the story closes, the young girl has grown up and is married.   She recalls her grandmother telling her if a wife does not give her husband a son then there is no point in her living.   

Kannan Lakshmi lives in New Delhi.   She has a Phd in English from Cambridge.   She has taught at several prestigious universities and is a leading advocate of the rights of women in India.   She writes in Tamil (a very old language spoken in parts of southern India and in Sri Lanka-it is also one of the official languages of Singpaore).   She translated this story herself.   She has written numerous novels, short stories and works of non-fiction that have been widely translated.   You can buy collections of her short stories on Amazon.   


This story can be read online HERE.   

Mel u

"Sweet Milk" by Kerala Das-കമലാ സുരയ്യ

"Sweet Milk" by Kamala Das-കമലാ സുരയ്യ-aka Kamala Suraiyya (2003, 3 pages, translated from Malayalam by Sindhu V.  Nair)

Kerala Das (1934 to 2009-Punnayurklam, Malabar District, India) was born  into a sucessful and prominent family.   Her mother was a famous poet, her father was  involved in the marketing of Rolls Royces and Bentleys in all of India.    Her native language was Malayalam, spoken by about 35 million people in southern India.   She also wrote in English but her short stories, which will be her lasting legacy, were in Malayalam.    She also had a weekly newspaper column for many years in which she discussed issues relating to the lives and rights of women.   She wrote about,  at the time,  near forbidden topics such as the sexuality of women.   She was socially and politically active.   At one time she was director of the forestry commission for the Malabar district.  She ran for Parliament and lost.  In 1989 she converted from Hinduisms to Islam.   She changed her name to "Kamala  Suraiyya.     (I have used her prior name in my post in conformity with the usage in the source for the story I read, The Little Magazine.)   Her work has been translated into French, English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and several other South Asian Languages.

"Sweet Milk" is a very moving quite poignant story about a less than storybook marriage that never the less works for both of them.   I guess a lot of marriages wind up like that.   

"At work, he did not think of her at all. They had married, against the wishes of their parents, after a courtship of a year or two. But they never did regret it. Lack of money, the children’s spells of illness — they were often dejected. She became careless of her appearance. To an extent, he lost the ability to laugh.

Still, they loved each other. Their three children also loved them. They were boys. Unni, 10, Balan, 7, and Rajan, 5. Three boys whose faces were always smeared with dirt, who had neither outstanding beauty nor brilliance. But the mother and the father said to each other —

"Unni is always making things. He has a taste for engineering."

"We should make Balan a doctor. See his forehead: such a wide forehead denotes intelligence."

"Rajan is not afraid of the dark. He is smart. He should join the army.""

The story takes a terrible turn.    The man finds his as far as anyone knew perfectly healthy wife dead on the floor of their flat.     Das a very good job in her treatment of the emotions the husband feels, including anger at his wife.   "Sweet Milk" is short, you can read it in two minutes.    It made me wonder what I would feel if left alone in similar circumstances with my three  daughters, even though this is the very last thing I wanted to think about.  

"Sweet Milk" is in the end but a simple story, not a great work of art, not Virginia Woolf , but it did make me see very clearly the humanity in people whose lives are very different from mine.    There is real wisdom in this story.   I will read another one of her stories soon, I hope.

You can read it online at The Little Magazine.    I read it twice, it will stay with me.  

I hope others with experience with the South Asia Short Story will offer their reading suggestions.    For sure there are interesting parallels here with the Irish Short story.     I did yesterday discover a new to me very interesting Irish writer of "weird stories" (he was a big influence on H. P. Lovecraft) and will post on him soon.  

Mel u

"Three Men" by Sunil Gangopadhyay -সুনীল গঙ্গোপাধ্যায় -

"Three Men" by Sunil Gangopadhyay -সুনীল গঙ্গোপাধ্যায় - (2000, 4  pages)

Cries in the mud by the thatch'd house sand drain
Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain
waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!
whose children still starve in their mother's arms curled.
Is this what I did to myself in the past?
What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?
Move on and leave them without any coins?
What should I care for the love of my loins?

(By  Allen Ginsburg upon the occasion of his visit to Bangladesh in 1971 in the company of the great poet, Sunil Gangopandhyay-you can read the full text of "September On Jessore Road"  HERE-it is deeply felt work and a powerful expression of the anguish felt by Ginsburg on seeing the human cost of the 1971 war for the Independence of Bangladesh.)

Sumil Gangopandhyay (1934) was born in Faridpur in what is now Bangladesh.   He currently lives in Kolkata (Calcutta) in India.    He is considered a leading novelist, travel writer, children's book author and is best known as a poet.   He writes in Bengali and English.   He was educated at the University of Calcutta.   He has had a long a very distinguished literary and professional career.   In 2008 he became director of the National Academy of Letters in India.   This is a government funded but administratively independent organization whose purpose is to promote literature and the maintenance of the diverse languages of  India.

"Three Men" is set in a big corporation.   (As social context, Bangladesh is often, fairly or not I do not know, listed as among the most corrupt countries in the world.)   The three men in the story are an ordinary worker, his manager, and the general manager.    Tapan, the worker, has begun to feel more and more self-contempt for his role in the corruption of  the company.   The company was recently involved in a press scandal in which it was documented they withheld baby food supplies in Bangladesh for two weeks in order to make consumers pay much more. This in a country where millions are on the edge of starvation and low value diets in infants cause terrible future problems.    Tapan, not in fact a perfect employee himself-he often misses work with no call in for example-is going into his bosses office to follow up on a denouncing letter he has written in which he gives his resignation.    As you might guess the conversation does not go well.  Tapan then demands as seems to be his right, to speak with the general manager.    As he waits outside the general manger's office he is advised by someone who does not know why he is there that he will from now on be getting a clothing allowance.    Tapan starts to think about his wife (he just got married a year ago and supports his aged father) who wants a house of their own soon.

As he enters the office the general manager tells him he can come in next week to pick up his final paycheck but if he continues ranting in the office he will have him thrown out by security.    As the story ends Tapan begs for a second change.   Before leaving for the day, he stops in the company comfort room.   He spits in his own image in the mirror.

"Three Men"  (written originally in English) is a moving story about a man with a consciousness of right or wrong trapped in a web of corruption.

You can read it HERE

The South Asian Short story is a tremendously rich reading area.    It is very accessible online.    You can easily find brand new stories by well known authors as well as older classic stories works.    The cultural roots of the South Asian Short Story go back beyond the days of Homer and the Old Testament.

I will be sort of focusing on stories about the lives of women and children, the effects of the 1947 partition,  and post colonialism.   The history involved here is delightfully complicated.    I will take this where it leads me with one writer or story leading to another.   Like the Irish to a large extent, writers in this area define themselves by their relationship to the English.    Like the Japanese (I will soon also begin a project on Taisho era short stories) there is much concern about preserving old traditions in the face of the intense attraction of consumer goods and the pervasive power of western culture.  

I am very open to suggestions and joint projects in this.  

Mel u-