Selected Stories – Anita Agnihotri

Description

A police superintendent, haunted by a subordinate’s violent death, can’t stop washing his hands. A young girl keeps returning to a silk factory’s ‘heat chamber’ — built to kill silkworms, and slowly killing its workers too. The wife of a Narmada Bachao Andolan activist drowns in her husband’s abuse and hypocrisy, like the lands swallowed by the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

Anita Agnihotri, a former IAS officer posted across India, writes about the lives that are easily overlooked — workers in remote outposts, fractured families, people living with poverty and displacement — balancing sharp social critique with lyrical tenderness.