Preface

Agartala is a young old city – half-gummed posters for politicians from long lost bypolls hiding pastel-painted walls warmed by the taillights of oversped cars that scream of misbegotten wealth and careless sex as they peel into dust; they reveal bricks that break into pebbles for the poor to skip across scummy pondlets, and they hide the dried cement spills into streets that crease across the city in a criss-cross, like the folds on the palm of an infant.

Agartala is a city turned back in time; her electric poles shall gather the same dust tomorrow that today cake the streets of Calcutta. Her things are named after affairs that were once princely but are today ghosts of a time long past; crumbling stadiums and open-drained roads with footpaths of sand, named after Kings whose scions have their beds cooled today by the swing of cheap, four-bladed fans. At the corners of the crossroads, in the cold nights of Agartala, people smuggle bootlegged booze, liquid sunshine, wrapped in old, battered Bisleri bottles. Their words hold them in a shivering embrace, to not slur, as they whisper ear to ear. They’ll tell each other the booze makes grass look greener on this side of their great country.

If you may, however, stray a little further – and there isn’t much further to stray, but just stray enough; beyond the circlet of trees, and off to the right rather than to the left, avoid the asphalt and the brick-and-mortar homes, across roads felled by the rain, and you shall find Agartala soon ceases to remain a city. What was named after Kings of no renown, just moments before, is now nameless, and the green of revenant forestry breaks ever slower into the gray of the skies than it did in the irreverent neatness of semi-urbanity. The flatlands of the city give way to hills, potted botany gives way to boorish overgrowth, hot tea and the harsh fluorescent streetlights of modernity give way to steaming chaa under the dim blaze of an infinitude of stars. It is here, very close, yet just far enough from the dimming lights of the city, that we would board our friends’ scooters in the early parts of the night, on the stormy afternoons, on the heels of the twilight hours, matches in one pocket, lighter in another, minds light of reminders of whether the future would get brighter. This is where people were born again, stories seeded and nebulized in the liminal spaces in the outskirts of the outskirts of this country, at what is the literal edge of what it means to share the Indian identity.

Because the lack of things to do gives people the liberty to dream.

This is a collection of stories born in that same liminality, set afloat by dreams and desire, and buoyed by chance to my corner of this universe, perhaps not so I could tell them, but stories I would love to tell, nevertheless. These are tales from lands barely three breaths removed from the borders of India – tales under suns that rose from the Borderline.