Stories from Kolkata are often assumed to be about bhadralok culture and the Bengali way of life. But Kolkata is a city with a multiplicity of stories to share. Contemporary Urdu Short Stories from Kolkata highlights the diversity of recent Urdu short stories from the city. In one story, a writer trying to escape the city wants to find the reason why the railway clock has stopped working, in another, a new friendship sours as soon as it blossoms, while some other stories show how the complexity of human relationships is explored. There is an experiment in abstraction, and legend and reality are brought together when three sleepers of an earlier civilisation wake up in the modern world. Dealing with love and loss, dreams and reality, as well as history and violence, this collection encompasses the whole gamut of human experience, seen through the eyes of current Urdu writers from Kolkata.\r\n

Shams Afif Siddiqi, former Associate Professor of English (WBES), author, short story writer, and literary critic, was born in 1955 in Kolkata. He taught in government colleges of West Bengal for 35 years and was a faculty member at MDI, Murshidabad. Khushwant Singh selected his short story for publication in The Telegraph in the 1980s. His publications include The Language of Love and other Stories (2001), a critical look at Graham Greene’s novels, Graham Greene: The Serious Entertainer (2008), and an annotated edition of G.B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man (2009). He lives with his wife in Kolkata.\r\n

Fuzail Asar Siddiqi is currently a PhD candidate at CES, JNU, New Delhi, researching on the modernist Urdu short story, in general, and short stories of Naiyer Masud in particular. The founder/editor-in-chief of an academic editorial services company, he has been an Assistant Professor of English at Gargi College, New Delhi.

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