Storywallah by Neelesh Misra's Mandali (Penguin)

Neelesh Misra is an Indian journalist, musician, writer, and the founder and editor of Gaon Connection, “India’s biggest rural media platform”. He is also the founder and CEO of Content Project Pvt. Ltd, a company that is “home to some of India’s best emerging writers, collectively called the Mandali”. 

Storywallah is a collection of short stories written by the Mandali. All of the writers originally wrote their stories in Hindi. The stories are as varied as the writers who come from all across India. In this collection, Misra features twenty writers including bloggers, teachers, a university professor and journalists. 

Kanchan Pat’s Wildflower is about an Indian daughter named Nemat who was brought up in Scotland by her mother. The mother left Nemat a letter after she died and in the letter asks Nemat to read it “not as a daughter but as a woman”. Now Nemat finds herself going to India, to a small town called Kosi in the mountains. She was going to seek help from the person she most hated - her mother’s lover. Her mother’s letter had caused her anguish but found that she couldn’t hate her mother nor forgive her. She was going to meet Anirudh Thakur which will help her decide “whether she would love Ma or hate her for the rest of her life.”

In Letters by Analuta Raj Nair, the protagonist is a sixty-year old man who is retiring from government service after working for thirty-five years. He had been working on his autobiography when he chanced upon a bundle of letters from a girl named Anamika - his first love. He has never told his wife about her and has never shown her any of the letters. The man wants to include his one and only love story in his autobiography “as if to make a dishonest relationship honest, legitimate” but is afraid to tell his wife of thirty some years. 

Nails by Umesh Pant centers around a girl named Simmi who’s about to get married and questions if she’s doing the right thing when on the day of their engagement, her fiance, Sumit,  says to her, “Yaar, the least you could have done was cut your nails. You know I don’t like these long nails.” Simmi tried to make light of the situation but noticed that her fiance looked more upset than he looked. But his response, “It’s not just a matter of a nail, Simmi” would not leave her mind.

The above are just a taste of the stories you will encounter. The other seventeen stories are all about everyday people living everyday lives. They all share a universal appeal as they focus on family relationships, love and betrayal, doing what’s best for the family or having the family and others decide what’s best for the person in question. Many of the stories are about finding who you really are. Each story is so different yet they all share a common quality, one in which anybody can see themselves as the main character in the stories. ~Ernie Hoyt