Principles of Prediction – Anushka Jasraj

Description

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.