The Fish Who Flew

Meenakshi Jauhari has been writing poetry and short fiction for more than thirty years. During the last decade, she has focused on writing and translating poetry, specifically Indian contemporary poets like Amrita Pritam. She is currently working on translating early Urdu literary works into English.

She began with children’s stories that were published by Children’s Book Trust, many of which went on to win prizes. Her short fiction has been featured in reputed literary journals such as Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), The Little Magazine, Out of Print and The Poetry Society (India) Journal.

She was born in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, and spent her childhood in Jamshedpur, Bihar, where her father worked with the Tata Group. Having earned a degree in computer science from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, she worked in the IT sector until the turn of the millennium, when she moved to publishing and writing for radio.

She lives in Gurgaon with her husband and son. This is her first anthology.

Teaser

Geometry

They were betrayed by geometry – the geometry
of a circular world that suggested they were certain
to run into each other some day. Through the motion
of days, and dreams, longitudes blurring into
time zones across airport coffeeshops, hoping,
imagining … like the misplaced, they would find each other
in lost-and-found bins, in warm airplane seats.

They figured geography maps would drop a clue, a city name,
a lake or even the kind of vegetation that would
somehow lead to a street, and a house number.

And what is a good time to call?
No time good enough to call people fallen through
the grating of years, dizzy with the round-and-round
motion of a geoid earth.

And now look … the sun strides in a vague direction of the west,
the universe struggling to reconcile the lines
and circles of their ordered world. Later, it
will try with moon chimes and jasmine breezes,
and through the debris of living collected
over the years …
as they still seek a straight line that will put them on a
single latitude on earth’s face.