Of everyday lives and timeless emotions

Ishi Pulugurtha's Framed, a collection of short stories, is a lesson in empathy, an invitation to initiate conversations on issues often subject to oversight in mainstream everyday discussions.

- Aparna Singh

The effortlessly unassuming narrative disarms the reader. One is awakened to its deceptive simplicity as one cruises through them, almost relaxing with a cup of coffee. Pulugurtha has an interesting, almost subversive understanding of the nuanced interface between the personal, the not-so-personal, and the political. The vivid, gentle narrative strokes lead the reader on, unsuspectingly, to unsettling realities and piercing glimpses of discomforts specific to old age: loneliness and dementia, loss of innocence, extramarital relationships, the brunt of lockdown during Covid.

In the titular short story "Framed," the narrative languorously dredges a not-so-eventful past before catching up with the pointedly poignant—"I saw my body dressed up in a saree." The seemingly good life is underscored with cracks bristling for attention: ". . . no one seemed to care whether or not I wanted to talk or if something was bothering me." The humane and frazzled look on the woman "standing there amid all those people" who had made the narrator feel nice and cared for lingers much after we finish reading it. The desire—coherent and not so coherent—to tie together loose threads of existence even in death, after one passes by them unwittingly, comes as a stark rejoinder to those who often ignore opportunities to care for the elderly with fuzzy or depleting memories.