HT reviewer Chittajit Mitra picks his favourite read of 2025
Translated from the original Hindi, this collection of a novella and five short stories unveils social hypocrisy and shows how the powerful rewrite reality and fool the masses
It always blows my mind that people are reading less fiction than non-fiction. This year, my recommendation is this petite book that I really relished, Courtesan Don’t Read Newspapers by Anil Yadav. Translated from Hindi by Vaibhav Sharma, it comprises a novella and five short stories that each try to unveil social hypocrisy and the cracks within. The volume takes its title from that of the novella about police official Ramashankar Tripathi, who decides to push sex workers from the locality of Manduadih in an attempt to alter his public image as the suspected murderer of his wife. When a photojournalist Prakash and his partner Chhavi attempt to help the helpless sex workers, the reader sees how an unholy alliance is formed to stop their efforts.
In a post-truth world, where facts are not facts anymore and people are relentlessly bombarded with distractions, it is stories like these that pull us back to the reality of our times. The novella shows how the powerful come together to rewrite reality and fool the masses.
The short stories in the volume show how deeply entrenched gender roles affect our society. In The Road to the Other World, a man understands, in hindsight, how his mother’s sister, who was suffering from tuberculosis, had to keep him entertained even in her dwindling condition. In Lord Almighty, Grant Us Riots! people soon realise that to escape the apathy of the administration they need to have a riot in their area. The story is a trenchant comment on the struggle of people from marginalized backgrounds for basic necessities; it’s a struggle that’s usually ignored. Anil Yadav’s work gives the reader a reality check, which, really, is what literature is supposed to do.
Chittajit Mitra (he/him) is a queer writer, translator and editor from Allahabad. He is co-founder of RAQS, an organisation working on gender, sexuality and mental health
