Simsim

Front Cover
Penguin Random House India Private Limited, Feb 6, 2023 - Fiction - 248 pages
Old Basar Mal remembers his love and homeland that he lost in Sindh, Pakistan during the Partition. A young graduate gets into an imaginary relationship with a girl at a yellow window. The Mumbai land mafia is after Basar Mal and his library. A chatty book cover relates the plight of books. A silent Mangan's ma washes and feeds a plastic doll she thinks is her son. Poignantly written by Geet Chaturvedi, a major Hindi writer, and beautifully translated by Anita Gopalan, Simsim is a struggle between memory, imagination, and reality- an exquisitely crafted book that fuses the voices of remarkable yet relatable characters to weave a tale of seeking happiness, fulfilling passion, and reconciling with loss. Simsim is charming, and wonderfully original.
 

Selected pages

Contents

My Name is
My Name is
The Book Cover Tells a Tale
The Old Mans Story
The Old Woman is Silent
The Old Mans Story
My Name is I

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2023)

GEET CHATURVEDI is a poet, novelist, and essayist. He is one of the most widely read contemporary Hindi authors. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the Syed Haidar Raza Fellowship for fiction writing, he was named among the Ten Best Young Writers of India by The Indian Express. He won the 2021 Vatayan-UK Literary Award for his contribution to Hindi literature. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.

ANITA GOPALAN is a writer, translator, and stock trader. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a fellowship in English literature from the Ministry of Culture. She is the translator of Geet Chaturvedi's The Memory of Now (Anomalous Press, USA). She has been published in AGNI, PEN America, Tupelo Quarterly, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Two Lines, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere.

Bibliographic information