Other Skies, Other Stories

These stories, written originally in Hindi, reveal an author who can think and create in two languages with rare fluency. With her faultless ear for the cadences of Hindustani, Sara Rai illuminates the life of small towns with details which perhaps only a bilingual writer would pick up on. Equally important to her in the landscape of human lives is the presence of trees, birds, insects, and fish. Her Zen-like meditations on the silent yet profound movements of this world are presented in a language that is pared down, spare, and evocative. She remains unseen, but her presence animates each of her characters, whether it be Surabhi from ‘Catfish’, the eponymous Nabila, or Sour Face and Shrew from ‘Golden Anniversary’. The stories are presented here in a lucid translation by Ira Pande and the author.

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Sara Rai is a writer, translator, and editor. She has published four collections of short stories and a novel in Hindi. The German translation by Johanna Hahn of her selected short fiction, Im Labyrinth (The Labyrinth), won the Coburg Rückert Prize 2019 and was nominated for the Weltempfänger Prize 2020. She has translated five collections of short stories from Hindi into English, most recently Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Blue is like Blue (with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra), which won the Atta Galatta Prize 2019 and the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award 2020. Her memoir Raw Umber won the Tata Literature Live Book of the Year Award 2023 in the nonfiction category.

Ira Pande taught English Literature at Panjab University, Chandigarh. She has worked at The Indian Express and later, the journals Seminar and Biblio. She was with Dorling-Kindersley and Roli Books before becoming Chief Editor of the IIC Quarterly. Her English translation of Manohar Shyam Joshi’s T’ta Professor won the Crossword and Sahitya Akademi awards in 2010. She has also written, and later translated into Hindi, Diddi: My Mother’s Voice, an acclaimed memoir of her mother, the late author Shivani.