STORIES
The Age
Saturday March 27, 2010
THIS co-publication by Picador Australia and Picador India is a collection of short fiction on the theme of terror. As co-editor Meenakshi Bharat points out in her foreword, terrorism has a long history in India, while awareness of it as something that might affect Australians is much more recent, and, she seems to be suggesting, disproportionate. Disproportionate, too, perhaps, is the expectation she places on the writers represented here to "shift perspectives" on the "phenomenon of modern terror".Three big names €” Salman Rushdie, David Malouf and Thomas Keneally €” are deservedly here by virtue of republished material, but there are plenty of stories from lesser-known writers from both India and Australia, many of which have been written specially for this book. The quality of these pieces is uneven.The best includes Khauf by Hindi and Urdu writer Gulzar. In this tense story, a man stricken by fear following riots in his city sits in a train, further terrified when another man enters his near-empty compartment. Convinced the other will kill him for being a Muslim, the man's fear intensifies.Preceding Salman Rushdie's contribution is Kiran Nagarkar's darkly amusing In Search of Essar about a man determined to carry out the fatwa on Rushdie.
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