I rushed to your picture frame first, but it yielded nothing. No, not nothing. A certain distaste, that felt like tar in my mouth, heavy, unrelenting, dark, putrid, unpleasant.

Volga’s novella On the Banks of the Pampa, translated deftly by Purnima Tamireddy from Telugu, is situated in the milieu of the mythological era of the Ramayana, but is very much a text of the present times.

The babble she hears all around her bounces off her ears in strangeness. People speak hurriedly here, in a different rhythm and she doesn’t know why she always imagines speeding trains that blur right in front of her eyes. Their tongues roll a lot and sometimes in front of a mirror she sticks out her tongue and flips it back to feel how the mouths of the people here must be when they speak.

She had always felt somewhat burdened by her name. Her name to her carried the expectations of her parents and family, which restricted her already timid movements.

She was too young to understand the full implicature of the term, but she knew the place where she stayed wasn’t home either.

It was her world, her link to outer space, just as the word was hers and hers alone.

After that, the two of them sat in companionable silence for some time. Night descended. There was a cool breeze. It was desolate.

The Optimists have just sat down to eat after an entire day of stories and laughter in their community. They have seen their public spaces brim with thready happiness.

Ashu later realized that the angry smile of Mana’s uncle came from a place of deep-seated hurt. Every story, every poem that he had read carried an image of that pain.