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NEW DELHI SATURDAY07 JANUARY 2012

VOLUME 9

I S S U E

01

OriginalFictions4

Nabarun Bhattacharya

Siddharth Chowdhury

Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

Kalki Koechlin

Amitava Kumar

Prashant Miranda

Jugal Mody

KR Meera

Suniti Namjoshi

Sourabh Ratnu

Rahul Soni

EDITOR Tarun J Tejpal MANAGING EDITOR Shoma Chaudhury DEPUTY EDITOR Ramesh Sharma EDITOR INVESTIGATIONS Ashish Khetan CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Ashok Malik SENIOR EDITOR Manjula Lal

EDITOR FEATURES Nisha Susan COPY EDITOR Srikanth S ASSISTANT EDITORS Rana Ayyub (MUMBAI) Kaushik Kashyap LITERARY EDITOR Gaurav Jain

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS Revati Laul, Brijesh Pandey, Rohini Mohan, Sunaina Kumar (MUMBAI) PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Tusha Mittal, Rishi Majumder, Ratnadip Choudhury (GUWAHATI)

CHIEF OF BUREAU Jeemon Jacob (SOUTH) SENIOR CORRESPONDENT Kunal Majumder CORRESPONDENTS Nishita Jha, Baba Umar, Avalok Langer, Sai Manish,Yamini DeenadayalanASST COPY EDITORS Anamika Chatterjee, Shone Satheesh Babu EDITOR’S OFFICE Ritu Sud (91.9810572889) MANAGING EDITOR’S OFFICE Megha Chhabra (91.9990997421)

DESIGN HEAD Anand Naorem ART DIRECTOR Sudeep Chaudhuri ASSISTANT ART DIRECTORS Naorem Ashish, Samia Singh DESIGN TEAM Ajoy Sen, Mahesh Singh Bhandari, Rishabh AroraDEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR Shailendra Pandey PHOTOGRAPHERS Garima Jain, Vijay Pandey, Tarun Sehrawat, Pintu Pradhan (KOLKATA) SENIOR PHOTO COORDINATOR Deepak Jha

WEB EDITORS Karuna John, Jugal Mody WEB DEVELOPER Lal Singh, Rammurti

MNGR-PRODUCTION Piyush Srivastava SYSTEMS HEAD Prawal Srivastava TEAM SYSTEMS Manoj Kumar, Pankaj Kumar, Arun Sehrawat, Nihar Ranjan, Bhumesh Kshetrimayum

PUBLISHER Neena Tejpal Sharma CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Neena Tejpal VP MARKETING Aparna JainVP-CIRCULATION Bharat Bhushan FINANCE MANAGER Brij Kishore Sharma ACCOUNTS Subodh Mishra, Rahul Varma ADVERTISING Satheesh Kumar +91.9845001410 E-MAIL: adsales@tehelka.com

OWNER Anant Media Pvt Ltd, M-76 (M-Block Market), Greater Kailash II, New Delhi-110048 PRINTER & PUBLISHER Neena Tejpal SharmaPUBLISHED FROM Anant Media Pvt Ltd, M-76 (M-Block Market), Greater Kailash II, New Delhi-110048 PRINTED AT M.P. Printers, B-220, Phase-II, Noida, UP

HEAD OFFICE M-76 (M-Block Market), Greater Kailash II, New Delhi-110048 TEL 91.11.40575757 FAX 91.11 40575757 E-MAIL editor@tehelka.com

Altaf TyrewalaManjula Padmanabhan

Mridula KoshyRajorshi Chakraborti

Ruskin BondAmruta Patil

Sunetra GuptaVivek NarayananAmbarish SatwikSarnath Banerjee

Anjum HasanSudeep Chakravarti

Kalpish Ratna

ORIGINAL FICTIONS 1

Original Fictions

4

Kuzhali ManickavelAseem KaulSujit SarafArul Mani

Paromita VohraGaurav SolankiAruni KashyapParvati SharmaCharu Nivedita

Mohan SikkaKaran Mahajan

Daman Singh

ORIGINAL FICTIONS 2Pankaj AdvaniPatrick Bryson

Siddharth ChowdhuryShehryar Fazli

Uzma Aslam KhanRajesh Kumar

George MathenHM NaqviZac O’Yeah

Surender Mohan PathakDevdutt Pattanaik

Atul SabharwalShiv Visvanathan

ORIGINAL FICTIONS 3

FOUNDER GROUP: TARUN J TEJPAL, NEENA TEJPAL, SHOMA CHAUDHURY, BRIJ K SHARMA, PRAWAL SRIVASTAVA

VOLUME 9, ISSUE 1; JANUARY 1-7, 2012, RELEASED ON DECEMBER 30, 2011; NUMBER OF PAGES INCLUDING COVER: 92FOR ENQUIRIES & COMPLAINTS CALL - DELHI - 011 3249 4466 | MUMBAI - 022 3204 7766 | BENGALURU - 080 3297 4466 or E-MAIL - RESPONSE@TEHELKA.COM

TEHELKA 7 JANUARY 2012

PRASHANT MIRANDA grew up inBengaluru, studied at NID and movedto Toronto 12 years ago. He balances

life between Canada and India,where he documents his journeys

through watercolour journals.

KR MEERA is a journalist and writerin Malayalam whose short stories,

translated both into Tamil and Telugu, have won several awards.

Penguin India published Yellow is theColour of Longing, a collection of her

short stories, in 2011.

JUGAL MODY believes that onlycomedy can save the world from its

people. He has worked with the interwebs and social media for

Filmfare and is now with Tehelka.Toke is his first novel.

SIDDHARTH CHOWDHURY is theauthor of Diksha at St. Martin’s

(2002), Patna Roughcut (2005) andDay Scholar (2010). Day Scholar wasshortlisted for the 2009 Man Asian

Prize. He lives in Delhi and works in publishing. 

NABARUN BHATTACHARYA is apoet and novelist in Bangla. Harbart,

his first novel, won the NarsimhaDas Award, Bankim Puraskar andSahitya Akademi Award. He has published seven novels, over 60

short stories and three volumes ofpoetry. He lives in Kolkata. 

SUNITI NAMJOSHI’s books includeFeminist Fables, Sycorax and the Aditi

series. Her forth coming books include The Monkey and the

Crocodiles: A Suniti Namjoshi Readerand The Unloved Queen

and Other Stories.

SHAMSUR RAHMAN FARUQIis Urdu’s leading literary figure

today. His Urdu novel Ka’i Chand The

Sar-e-Aasman is to be shortly

published in English as Wazir Khanam.

MUSHARRAF ALI FAROOQI’s newnovel Between Clay and Dust will bepublished in April 2012 by the AlephBook Company. He is the author of

the novel The Story of a Widow (Picador India).

7 JANUARY 2012 TEHELKA

SOURABH RATNU has worked onand off in the film and television

industry in Mumbai for the past 10years. He is interested in people and

occasionally tells stories. 

KALKI KOECHLIN is an actor andwriter. She and Prashant Prakashwon the 2009 Hindu MetroPlus

Playwright Award for their play TheSkeleton Woman. She won a FilmfareAward for her debut in Dev D (2009),

and acted in and co-wrote the filmThat Girl in Yellow Boots (2010).

RAHUL SONI is a writer and translator based in New Delhi. He is

the founder-editor of Pratilipi, a literary journal, and Pratilipi Books,an independent publishing imprint.

His works-in-progress include a documentary, a novel and a book

of non- fiction.

AMITAVA KUMAR’s latest book, AForeigner Carrying in the Crook of HisArm A Tiny Bomb, received the Best

Non-Fiction of 2010 Award from theAsian American Writers’ Workshop.

ARUNAVA SINHA is a translator of classic and contemporary

Bangla fiction. His latest publishedtranslations are Harbart and

When The Time is Right. He lives inNew Delhi.

SAJEEV KUMARAPURAMdesigns a business weekly to

finance his sojourns to the Himalayas. He is currently doodlingfor an upcoming English horror film.

TEHELKA 7 JANUARY 2012

AT AGE 10, my response to the passionate rages and recriminations of the protagonists of my veryfirst Mills & Boon (set in the Australian outback)was: Where are their parents?

Growing up, I had read whatever I could find inmy disorganised household. To the adults whobought me Russian folktales, Enid Blytons andabridged illustrated classics, I said: keep them com-ing. I read them happily. But I was reading things Isuspected they didn’t want me reading. The Bible,cover to cover, as if it was a thriller. Margaret Meadon Samoa. Any number of eye-popping, buttock- waving Harold Robbins. War and Peace during a boutof measles. A humongous Freud biography. Some Ienjoyed tremendously (The Bible and Harold Rob-bins). Some were good in parts, like the curate’s egg.Some I found truly baffling (Erewhon!) But none ofthese excursions prepared me for the romance novel.

The only other genre I knew, from this goat-likeapproach to reading, which carefully documentedminute costume changes the way romance novelsdid, was porn. But two more M&Bs down and I washooked. At 13, I could already pick, out of hundredsof identical-seeming paperbacks, particular romanceauthors who would give me a good time within thestrict confines of 200 pages and a happy ending. Theones who were funny, the ones whose heroines werelikely to drive a bulldozer (verbal or actual) into thehero’s pretensions (verbal or architectural), the oneswhere the hero was (surprise) a virgin, the ones involving time travel, the ones involving the insertionof unlikely objects into even more unlikely orifices. I knew I could not stomach wide-eyed pollyannaswho healed the wounds a cold upbringing had infli cted on the hero. Far better the practical, sche -ming Regency period minxes of Georgette Heyer’s

Like A Building FallingOn Your Head

NISHA SUSANurges you to forget the high/low culture debate and fall right in