About the Book

PARED TO THEIR ESSENCE, YET VIVID AND UNCANNILY OBSERVANT, THESE ARE STORIES ABOUT OUR MOST INTIMATE SELVES.
There is in the short story the extraordinary ability to hold and enthral, to capture whole worlds with intensity and brevity. And that's exactly what Anushka Jasraj accomplishes in this luminous collection. In the tale that gives this collection its name, a weather forecaster tries to maintain her sanity while a storm threatens, literally and figuratively. In 'Circus', a young woman runs away from her home and husband to live with Rajan, the lion-tamer, the perfect being, both man and woman. In the award-winning 'Radio Story', politics and nostalgia come together to form a complex mesh of love and violence, while in 'Hair', a husband resents the intrusions of his wife's hair.
In spare prose that heightens the impact of every little revelation, story after story - some of them subtly interlinked - draws us into the lives of sisters and friends, parents and daughters, men and women in relationships that casually shrug off easy definition. There is tenderness here, and bewilderment, as well as reconciliation, as characters strip themselves bare to show us their most intimate fears and fantasies.

About the Author

Anushka Jasraj is a writer and practitioner-in-training working at the intersection of psychoanalysis and the expressive arts. She holds a BFA in Film Production from New York University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a 2015-16 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Asia in both 2012 and 2017. She will begin doctoral research in Psychoanalysis at the Global Center for Advanced Research in 2026. She lives in Mumbai with her dog Kanamma.