About the Book

PARISMITA SINGH’S DEEPLY OBSERVED STORIES ABOUT LIFE IN THE MIDST OF, AND IN THE AFTERMATH OF, CONFLICT ARE AS AFFECTING AS THEY ARE ILLUMINATING.
When violence has seeped into the very soil and water of a place, the peace that follows is poisoned too. And everywhere, stories rise to the surface.
In the uneasy, purgatory-like time of ceasefire, there is a sense of renewed optimism. An old man recalls the dream romance of Rwmaii and Sylvia, interrupted by her marriage to a militant. A journalist doesn’t know what to do with a murder story that could have been a scoop. A mysterious gun-flute man maintains both peace and terror. An unlikely acquaintance walks Sultana home through an undeclared curfew.
In Parismita Singh’s luminous, haunting stories of these years of imminent peace, the rivers, forests, villages, and the many cultures of a small place – Rabha, Bodo, Santhal, Nepali, Koch-Rajbongshi, Muslim – come blazingly alive. To read these stories is to rewire our ideas of war, resolution, and the lives that are lived in between.

About the Author

Parismita Singh is a writer and artist whose publications include the graphic novels The Hotel at the End of the World and Mara and the Clay Cows, and the anthology Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India (2017). She lives in Guwahati, Assam