Pardon the egg salad stains

Reading is messy.

May 31, 2024

The monsoons will shortly arrive in India, but at TBLM, we’re concerned with a different kind of deluge. We are already maxed out on poetry & fiction submissions, and we’ll close the other categories by end of day (May 31, midnight IST). Our editors have begun wading through 800+ submissions —almost a million words— making margin notes, reading, re-reading, searching for those 25 or so items that’ll constitute Issue 58. Searching for love, that is. Billy Collins, in his poem Marginalia, talks about coming across greasy stains in a library copy of Catcher in the Rye and a penciled note in the margins: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”

In his essay, Tanuj Solanki expands on this moment of judgment and commitment intrinsic to the act of reading, especially in the process of selecting for a literary magazine.

But first, some glad tidings:

Soni Somarajan, who was once all set to be a soldier, has joined as an Associate Editor in the poetry team.
Also joining the poetry team are four brilliant readers: Aakanksha Ahuja, Amal Mathew, Ashish Kumar Singh and Zainab Ummar Farook. All poets are inscrutable by definition, but we have managed to pin down their slippery selves, if only for a second, on our insta (@bombaylitmag). It’s part of our new “ars poetica” series on insta.
In collaboration with The Impact Society, Siddharth Dasgupta, our visual narratives editor, is mentoring a gathering of narrators of all kinds. The Storyteller's Residency/ Goa Edition takes place from June 5-9 at a beautiful old villa amid —in Siddharth’s words— “the textures and fables of Majorda”. Siddharth reports that craft & truthfulness are on the agenda, so we know the cops will be called at some point.

It looks like it’s going to rain in a bit. Settle in for a good read.

Colophon: The Beginnings of Stories

TANUJ SOLANKI

Literary magazine editors are love-of-the-thing workers, imbued with goodness of heart but given to assaults from the why-am-I-doing-this pathogen. A particularly tormented subset here is that of fiction editors. Why tormented? Because of the sheer reading load. At The Bombay Literary Magazine, eg., fiction editors collectively read more than 1,200 stories per year, which is, by our very sophisticated and very intimate capacity calculations, the most that we can do without brain matter dribbling out of our ears. The reading load can be between 300 to 400 stories at an individual level. The minimum word length for a TBLM story is 2,000 words, so, assuming an average of 3,000 words per story, the annual reading load of a fiction editor at TBLM is about a million words. That’s War & Peace and Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and perhaps some deliberations on Art and God to boot.

The Tolstoy analogy applies only on the axis of word count, of course. Reading for TBLM is not like reading the oeuvre of a master every year; it is reading a packet with a multitude of signatures: the first-ever, the formative, the unpolished, the overcooked, the trying-too-hard, the casual, the provocative, the divisive, the indecipherable, and so on. There is, of course, that rare instance of the sublime, but it is not humanly possible for the editorial antenna to be tuned only to that frequency. It is certain—despite our tiered reading mechanism and the power vested in each editor to pitch stories they loved more than the team—it is certain that every now and then the sublime passes through our fingers because we are unable, in the moment, to give it the noticing it requires. This is the nature of the beast as far as reading for a literary magazine goes. And because it is all love, thinking about what we might have missed can be torture.

But we get it right far more often than we get it wrong. A common thing readers will note among most stories published at TBLM is a promise that is palpable right at the beginning. Once you begin, you want to read on. This is often earned through clear-eyed, and immediate, statements of the characters’ situations—intrigue delivered through forward-leaning set-up rather than obfuscation. In a TBLM story, stylistic slants are appreciated when they progressively disambiguate the narrator or the character rather than when they seem subscribed to baroqueness as an end. If the narrator speaks plainly and bluntly, and if that is credible throughout the story, then give us plain and blunt. We publish stories, not sentences.

As an example of a story with a resoundingly simple but magnetic beginning, I offer ‘Between Waiting Rooms’ by Bikram Sharma, published in Issue 54 of the magazine in April 2023. This is how the story begins (the emphases are mine):

Ma called to tell me she’d had a fall, nothing serious. I asked her what she meant by a fall. She said she slipped on the stairs and fractured her ankle. I asked her what the hell she meant by nothing serious then, and she clicked her tongue and told me not to worry, Mrs Noor had taken her to the hospital and a doctor had wrapped her ankle in a cast.
I booked a train ticket back home.

Ma called… I asked… She said… I asked… I booked.

There is celerity here, and a directness. We are immediately dunked in the situation.

In the next paragraph, which ends the opening section of the story, we are already at the railway station:

Rochelle dropped me off at the station after work. We walked to my platform and shared a cigarette. She asked me when I’d be back. I told her I had no idea, that I’d asked for two weeks off but Ma was in her sixties and would need help. Passengers rushed about us. Rochelle’s husband called. She hugged me goodbye before answering her phone, and then I was boarding my train and sliding away from Hyderabad towards Bangalore.

Note that the clipped nature of sentence openings persists. There are no clausal gymnastics. By now the editor (to use a specific category of reader), already intrigued by the fate of Ma, begins to note the story as stylistically consistent. They may not expect the whole story to be told like this, but they’ve begun to appreciate the efficiency of the opening: in just 150-odd words (half a printed book’s page), we have been given 5 members of the cast (The narrator, Ma, Mrs. Noor, Rochelle, Rochelle’s husband) and a pressing situation (Ma’s health/fall). The editor is eager to see what might happen in Bangalore.

That said, it is not necessary, or even viable, for every story to plunge us into a situation rightaway. In The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, articulating a possibility—even if old-fashioned—for the opening of novels, Orhan Pamuk comments on the opening of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black thus:

Most novelists sense that reading the opening pages of a novel is akin to entering a landscape painting. Let us remember how Stendhal begins The Red and the Black. We first see from afar the town of Verrières, the hill it is situated on, the white houses with their peaked red-tile roofs, the clumps of flourishing chestnut trees, and the ruins of the town's fortifications. The River Doubs flows below. Then we notice the sawmills and the factory that produces toiles peintes, colorful printed textiles.
Only a page later we have already met the mayor, one of the central characters, and have identified his cast of mind.

The short story may not find it convenient to begin like this—with wide surveys of space, a seemingly omniscient narrator, and a deferred arrival to character—simply because of its shortness and its commitment to precision. Most contemporary stories do not, in fact, begin in this manner. Even novels do not. But in ‘The Uncertainty Principle’, published in Issue 56 of TBLM, Mithila R begins like Stendhal might have, offering us a map-level and then a passing-vehicle-level view of Shamlapur, a suburb of Ahmedabad, where the story is set. What holds the editor’s attention here is the gradual narrowing down of the setting, the clarity and verve of successive descriptions, and the commingling of a socio-economic tidbit or two with the whole. The editor knows the story hasn’t really begun, but they have been made to see a series of images, and that is its own reward:

Even by the unhurried standards of Ahmedabad, where long hours of sunlight stretch the day like an unbroken dream, the suburb of Shamlapur can seem especially slow. One of the oldest settlements on the newer bank of the Sabarmati, Shamlapur boasts old money and older residents. Narrow lanes peel away from the main arterial road, pushing deeper into the quiet, giving way to hushed bungalows with private sandstone temples, whose rounded cupolas rise above the compound walls to cast a stern gaze at the neighbours. The dense, leafy canopy catches most of the dust that blankets the city, and allows things to resemble their actual colours. The leaves sway with the breeze in an emerald haze, here and there a shock of bright green or light yellow. The seething Ahmedabad sun reaches these parts shyly, filtered through the trees to throw dappled shadows on the ground. It is here, past these bungalows, round the corner from the Post Office, camouflaged by suburban idyll, that an eight-feet-high enclosure wall emerges suddenly from behind the trees.

The description continues to narrow down for one more paragraph, and then for a third of yet another paragraph, till it arrives at its grounding situation and personalises its narrator with a sentence beginning with the word ‘I’. There is no doubt that such an opening places a greater onus on what happens next. Had the following narrative not been rewarding, the opening would have retrospectively appeared like an arbitrary delaying tactic or a stylistic indulgence the writer found difficult to wiggle out of. That is, most definitely, not the case with the story in question. But my point is that, in and of itself, the opening of The Uncertainty Principle does not cause a hindrance to the literary magazine editor. It introduces its setting more than holistically and at leisure, yes, but the continuous narrowing down—along with a dint of subjectivity—promises things to come.

The Uncertainty Principle’s late introduction of its first-person narrator is most uncommon. The story in first person, insofar as it is a retelling of something personal, usually has an ‘I’ included somewhere in the first couple of sentences. The familiar and the unfamiliar are both valid approaches for such a story’s beginning. By familiar I mean the recounting of a category of incident that may evoke the relatability response in the reader, whereas with the unfamiliar I mean something so unique that it is likely to have happened only to the narrator. While the unfamiliar carries an implicit anecdotal charge, the familiar or relatable must work hard to bypass banality. This may be achieved either through great specificity or with a certain slant in language that is in itself defamiliarising. Second Place by Eshna Sharma, published in Issue 55 of TBLM, starts with the promise of narrating a familiar incident—the narrator’s first kiss—and uses specific descriptions of the locality and its denizens to earn its freshness:

I kissed a boy for the first time in the colony park. It was overrun by yellowing grass and plastic wrappers and the ends of all the cigarettes the neighbourhood’s teenagers secretly smoked. It was deep in the afternoon, the sweet spot where all the elderly were asleep and the footballers were trudging home from school or were making their way to maths and physics and chemistry tuition, and so the park was peaceful and quiet and consequently, very inviting to people like me.

There is an unmistakable sense of threshold crossing in this paragraph—a first kiss, teenagers who smoke, footballers making their way to dour tuitions. It situates it as a story of young people who are, voluntarily or involuntarily, changing. In the next paragraph, a delightfully dirty insight (emphasised below) makes the editor surrender all doubt about the authenticity of the narrative voice. We are only two paragraphs in, and already there is the payoff of learning a subjective truth. How does one not read on?

We sat down beside each other on a rusted bench. It was a coveted spot because it was surrounded by trees and bushes, the angles and combined effort of which made the bench nearly invisible to most visitors. If you ever began to doubt the privacy the bench afforded you only had to look about in the dirt around it. If you found a condom wrapper—left usually by the more adventurous kinds—you were mostly safe. He stood up one more time to check once more that nobody was around, and when he began to walk back my blood was pounding so hard in my ears I couldn’t even hear the crackling of dry leaves beneath his feet.

In offering the above three examples, I aimed to provide no definitive view of how a story must begin. Such a thing isn’t possible. But I realize that none of the examples cited is mired with what, to me, usually becomes a shortcut to rejection: mauve prose or puce prose (to avoid the harshness of purple). Ornate or muddled description without the promise of movement or drama, high philosophy without the desire for subjective truth, imaginative overload without the promise of readerly payoff, and prolonged interiority without incident—these put me in the amber zone. I start seeing curlicues in my mind’s eye. I start planning vacations. I start thinking of what I could have said better in that family argument.

Perhaps there is in the selection of these specific examples a hidden request for empathy with the literary magazine editor. The short-story writer will do well to appreciate just how much this reader has on their plate, how jaded they are with compositional acrobatics (when done for their own sake), and how badly they seek that which declutters (and draws them in, despite the pressures on their time and attention). A literary agent or an editor at a well-known publisher, once they commit to it, may be able to read your work as part of a compensated activity, and, therefore, with a certain amount of patience and indulgence. But a literary magazine editor is doing something extra, wondering if they should be elsewhere, questioning if reading your work is the most profitable use of their time (while—and this is a contradiction—hoping to be amazed by it). Page one thus has particular importance, for the impression a story leaves on the editor on page one is never out of their inner argument as they deliberate the story later. The key test for writers is simple: Did you pull the editor out of the feeling of doing a chore and remind them why they do this extra thing? Did you push them into being what they love being, which is, a curious reader?

——
Tanuj Solanki is the author of four books of fiction, including the short-story collection “Diwali in Muzaffarnagar", which won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2019. For more of his work, see his personal substack which has “reviews, essays, notes on reading, notes on writing, and sometimes a short story”.

Remainders & Reminders:

As part of the 2024 Anantha Literary Festival, Samyukta Poetry in collaboration with the editors of The Bombay Literary Magazine is hosting an online “ask us anything” session on how editorial decisions are made at literary magazines. If you’re in India, then it’s “today”, that is, May 31, 8:45 PM IST.

You are invited, dear writer, to attend and to send us questions in advance. Either drop your questions in the comments feed here or our Insta announcement or send ‘em via email to help@bombaylitmag.com, subject: Query the Crow.

Crow & Colophon

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