Hawa Hawa: and Other Stories

A collection of inventive and surprising short stories from one of India’s most prominent countercultural writers.   In this wildly inventive collection of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s stories we meet characters such as a trigger-happy cop in an authoritarian police state a man who holds on to a piece of rope from a deadly noose a retired revolutionary thrilled by delusions of grandeur and people working for a corporation that arranges lavish suicides for a price. Ranging from scathing satires of society to surreal investigations of violence and love these stories are also a window onto the political and social climate in Bengal tracing both pan-Indian developments like the 1975 Emergency and local ones like militant-leftist Naxalism and the decades-long Communist reign in the state. Expertly translated from the Bengali Hawa Hawa and Other Stories is a journey through the mind of one of the most daring countercultural writers of India one with particular resonance in these chaotic times.