Blue Is Like Blue : Stories

By Vinod Kumar Shukla| Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

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About the book

Winner of the Atta Galatta – Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize (Fiction) 2019.Renowned for bringing the marvellous to the ordinary, Vinod Kumar Shukla has long been recognized as one of India’s foremost writers, with a voice uniquely his own.The stories in Blue Is Like Blue deal with ‘smaller-than-life people’. They live in rented accommodation, often in single rooms, where one electric bulb does for light. There’s a nail to hang clothes from and a wall-to-wall string for the washing. When the clothes are dry, you place the carefully folded shirt under a pillow and lie down to sleep. Money is a concern, but the bazaar is the place to go and spend time in, especially if you have nothing to buy. The fear that you may be overcharged accompanies every transaction, but joy is not entirely absent. Few works of modern Indian literature come alive in English, and fewer still in the way that these stories do in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai’s brilliant translation.

Pages: 168

Available in: Paperback

Language: English

Vinod Kumar Shukla

VINOD KUMAR SHUKLA is a poet and novelist from Raipur, Chhattisgarh. In 1999, Shukla received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel, Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi. In 2023, he was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA is the translator of The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry, Songs of Kabir and Treasurer of Piggy Banks, a selection of Vinod Kumar Shukla’s poems.

Stark and mesmerizing, these stories puzzle, disturb and seduce the reader. Shukla whittles reality down to its bare poetic core. - AMITABHA BAGCHI

Vinod Kumar Shukla’s world is set just a little bit askew and, thus, the quotidian becomes unusual, the mundane remarkable. The reader is persuaded to marvel anew at the follies and foibles of the human species. - ARSHIA SATTAR

In what way is over-familiarity akin to the uncanny? In what sense are the lives we lead each day in rooms, streets, and shops not entirely our own? To find the answer to these questions, we must read the sui generis Vinod Kumar Shukla, whose work reminds us that deep originality will always find its own home and language. His translators have taken up the questions and challenges his work poses, and these superb English versions constitute their response. - AMIT CHAUDHURI

There’s a vein of gold in Chhattisgarh and it passes under Vinod Kumar Shukla’s house in Raipur. Shuklaji has been quietly mining it for the past half-century and more. The house key hides in plain sight: to see it an intruder would need to go back to 1937, to dip a particular brass lota in a specific stream of consciousness, to master the art of the delicious non sequitur, to develop an acute sense of the small-town absurd, and much else. The list is long and life is short. A sensible prowler would give up and sit down with any book by this great original; these stories, deftly rendered, are an excellent place to start. You’d get no richer, but you’d get up wiser and lighter and nimbler, perhaps even a better burglar. - IRWIN ALLAN SEALY