At a conference in Delhi, Assamese writer Sanjib reimagines the enduring fable of Tejimola, the girl who sprouted leaves. But the English-language literati don’t understand why he doesn’t write about the insurgency.

With the very first story in this unusual and unapologetic collection, Aruni Kashyap sets the tone for an intimate exploration of a terrain that is both familiar and alien. In the spirit of modern post-colonial storytellers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Daniyal Mueenuddin, his stories press the silences of the village and the nascent city to reveal their secrets. The result is a frank appraisal of our hypocrisies and desires, hopes and defeats—the stuff of the stuff we carry within us. Through tales that root up love, violence, motherhood and sex, Kashyap appears to ask: what are the stories about a place that are told, which ones are worth telling, what do we really want to say?

Aruni Kashyap is a writer and translator. He is the author of the novels The House with a Thousand Stories (Viking, 2013, English) and Noikhon Etiya Duroit (Panchajanya Prakashan, 2019, Assamese). He won the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing, the University of Edinburgh, in 2009, and his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was a finalist for the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and 2018 Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His short stories, poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals and anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Hindu, Evergreen Review and other publications. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, Athens, USA.