BETWEEN THE LINES

Books have always been a way to escape – something which is more important than ever during these strange times. The 2021 JCB Prize for Literature shortlist is proof

- BARRY RODGERS

There are a few things that have kept us going through these times: Empathy, love, art. Now more than ever, we need to listen to the other and lose ourselves in a new story. Presenting a cross-section of the multiple diversities in India, the five novels on this year's JCB Prize for Literature shortlist speak in layered voices often laced with irony. Inventive and insightful in the way only literature can be, they create disparate worlds, each a microcosm with larger resonances and significance. The anguish of Kashmir, the turbulence of ethnic conflict in the northeast, the disharmony of lives spent in narrow social and psychological confines, each with their specific difficulties – the novels dive deep into these particular, ordinary lives and come up having discovered in them the extraordinary.

NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING

BY DARIBHA LYNDEM

On one occasion they shot Mr Arora, the car parts shop owner, who lived down the road from my grandmother. One evening as he was locking up at the end of the day, he was shot at close range just outside his shop. He died instantly. He left behind a wife and a young son. I overheard my family discussing that he had been killed because he had failed to pay the weekly 'fees' Saw Dak demanded of him. But a week later it was а found that he had in fact paid them, and there had been a mix-up. The group had shot a man who had paid for his safety. I always wondered if they felt any remorse.