I write about love, politics, struggles and empowerment
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Tales of the Anointed Skeletons and Love
Nominated for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize 202
18 short stories. 18 journeys.
Love. Desire. Justice. Struggles.
Empowerment. Myth. Mystery.​
(foreword by Mitra Phukan)
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Padma never understood what was in his smile that spellbound her and shrouded her in a confusing cloud of bliss and painful longing.
- from the short story Dilemma
Undaunted by the light, the spectre curled its gelatinous, blood-red lips into an ugly smile, revealing its sharp canines.
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- from the short story The Trapped Spirits
On beholding the twenty widows, clad in white saris and ecstatically yelling their shaven heads off, as they emerged from the enclosure, their bright red vehicles cavorting towards the end of the track, some smiled, some muttered, and some others clicked their cameras.
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- from the short story The City of Gold
One of these dazzling silver shields was nothing but the lid of a basket embedded in the soil: a basket teeming with snakes.
- from short story Silver Jubilee
Tall, well-built, with sparkling eyes, an aquiline nose and shapely lips, Ranvijay was no less handsome than Sandeep. Moreover, the fun of being a rich man’s wife was too much to resist. She pictured herself flitting across Ranvijay's palatial house, donning silk gowns like the ones she had seen only in movies, sipping red wine, tapping her feet in the concerts of her favourite musicians, cheering her preferred team from the best stands or just lazing around in a fancy yacht. Her conscience pricked as the days knocked on each other, urging her to arrive at a decision, but she found a way to deal with it. She dragged in forgotten arguments with Sandeep, and unearthed and re-opened sealed and buried points of disagreements. Then she went on to blow up like a balloon his slightly annoying habits and clubbed all his minor failures together so she could revisit them again and again whenever in doubt, just the way she would revise her lessons before the exams.
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- an excerpt from the short story The Gift
“But one year is too long to wait for a surprise,” Grace remarked, playfully resting her head on her husband's left shoulder.
“You want one now?”
Grace nodded and smiled, her eyes twinkling with anticipation.
“You will get one on the way, a few minutes before reaching our cottage.”
“Really?”
“Really. But a small one...”
“That doesn’t matter.”
Tushar now felt like kicking himself. It could be the pleasure of driving through the uncongested road or the general hilarity of a holiday after three weeks of late-night office work or both that had relaxed his habitual cautiousness. How risky would it be to alight from the car with his wife at such a desolate spot? But Grace was a stubborn lady, and sure enough, when they were only half an hour away from reaching Nimpur, she reminded Tushar to reveal the surprise.
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- an excerpt from the short story The Christmas Eve
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“In view of the fact that everyone steals, theft has been made legal based on the universal truth that whatever is acceptable to everyone in the society is beneficial for its progress. Under the ambit of the new law, stealing of money, stealing of property and also stealing of women are allowed. Although the last clause has met with several rounds of protests from both women and men, the fact remains that equating women with property is again acceptable in our society. Abiding by the above-mentioned truth, the attitude of the majority should be recognized by the law in a democratic country such as ours.”
The soon-to-retire clerk ’s eyes popped out as the news went on. “The person from whom something has been stolen can retaliate by stealing from others, introducing a system of justice unparalleled in history. This will also diminish the burden of courts reeling under the load of too many cases.”
In the following months, even the timidest organisations, which were used to trickling public money into their pockets in the manner of carrying sand that escapes into shoes while walking along a beach, felt no hesitation in scooping in a bucketful. Sanctioned structures for public utility like schools, colleges, hospitals, bridges and flyovers remained on paper. Huge residential blocks came up anywhere and everywhere - clogging ponds, crushing agricultural fields, seizing sold plots, cordoning off playgrounds and evicting the ghosts from the crematoriums as land, both public and private, fell under the category ‘property’ and thus could be stolen.
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- an excerpt from the short story The New Law
In a clearing, now the predator stands,
its long vertebra
a corrugated path of evolution,
the ribcage a basket spilling speculation,
but those sharp teeth still bore through
a mind of crammed visuals
till those huge empty sockets pass our stares
to the other exhibits on the wall behind.
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- from the poem Predator
About Lahari Mahalanabish
Lahari Mahalanabish (Chatterji) is a writer and poet from Kolkata, India and currently based in Sydney. She is the author of the recently published short story collection Tales of the Anointed Skeletons and Love (Ukiyoto Publishing) and One Hundred Poems (Writers Workshop, 2007). Her short fiction was long-listed for the Grindstone International Short Story Prize (2020); poems were shortlisted for the Passionfruit Review Poetry Prize 2023, Mslexia Poetry Competition 2021 (judged by Pascale Pettit), Erbacce Prize Poetry Competition (2009 and 2010), short story collections for Eyelands Book Awards (2019 and 2020), and Rock the Chair Weekly Poetry Contest by Yellow Chair Review. She also won Money Series Short Story Competition by TMYS Books (2021) and was among top 5 in Being Woman contest held by Story Mirror.
Her short stories were published in the anthologies 2020 Grindstone Anthology, Where the Kingfisher Sings (2021), Moolah (2021) and From my Window (2023); prose pieces in Through the Looking Glass: Reflecting on Madness and Chaos Within and But You Don’t Look Sick. Her poems have found places in anthologies such as An Adventure called Life (2024), Petals and Chocolates (2023), Yellow Chair Review 2015 Anthology, Freedom Raga (2020), The Kali Project (2021), The Ocean Waves (2021), New Normal (2021) and Van Voice: Forests and Their People (2021). Her short stories have appeared in various literary magazines like The Bombay Review, The Bangalore Review, Asian Extracts, The Teesta Review, Soft Cartel, Muse India, Himal Southasian, Spark, Indian Review, The Criterion, Ashvamegh, The Thinking Pen and newspapers such as The Statesman and The Asian Age. Her poems have been published in Mslexia magazine, Passionfruit Review, Yellow Chair Review, Verse=Virtual, Poets Online, Saw, The Statesman, The Hans India, Setu journal, EKL Review, Dissident Voice, and Literary Yard.
She is a software engineer by profession, having graduated from Jadavpur University (BE in InfoTech) and the mother of two.
She blogs (http://theserpentacursedrhyme.blogspot.com) to chronicle her travels and highlight the work carried out by an orphanage and rural empowerment initiative she is associated with. She draws inspiration for her fiction and poetry from the exposure gained through her different pursuits and involvements.