Each taunts the other about food habits and appearance. Their attachment based on fights and reconciliations over the years while growing up in a shared geographic space but in separate religious cultures, called for an understanding of different customs and festivals among Hindus and Muslims. The first story I sent her was Ismat Chughtai's 'Kafir' (Urdu) about children- a Hindu boy and a Muslim girl. Those stories, all by famous regional language writers, and translated into English, would be my friend's literary gateway to India. Telling myself that she was in for a literary treat, and confident that I could supply this digest of our writings carrying the sights and sounds, the colours and complexities of our lives, I turned to a readymade package of Indian savouries and sweets: for four years I had been selecting translated stories for a news magazine. Here was the interested but uninformed foreign reader who we always hope will experience our country by proxy.

I set her on a bridge of English built by Indians who had succeeded well enough in India.

I was reminded of a prolonged exchange earlier last year, when an elderly European friend who, impressed by the news of the JCB winner Moustache, asked me to recommend stories by Indian writers in order to get 'an idea of India.' It might be in the rules to do with rites or hierarchies or the do's and don'ts of social behavior that a viewer from outside the culture will always miss. Either the translation defeated my understanding ('Down every alleyway at least one good heart expressed disbelief ' on page 1 and 'How do you let yourself do that?' on page 27) or I simply couldn't recognize the social signposts in these stories, (for instance, references to the Head of the Quarter.) What was it, I wondered, gloomily admitting that some things were simply untranslatable and instead of clarifying, merely added to our mutual incomprehension? Much as we long to understand one another, there is always something slightly out of reach in a film from another country. I thought I saw a similar broken wall and tried to go through it while reading the widely discussed literary find, The Quarter by Naguib Mahfouz.

When his emotions shattered his vocabulary, a senior manager would windmill his arms about and say, 'Theees thaaat, thaaat theees.' His subordinates understood what his near wordlessness meant.

Indian tamil stories