‘Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers’: Anil Yadav’s stories of the Hindi heartland cause shock and rage

Strange things keep happening in this world. Suicides are ruled out as accidents, a whole city demands that women in prostitution be thrown out, real estate developers want to offer ticketed shows to witness life in red light areas up close, meticulously written reports are quietly sidelined for sensational headlines. But are these occurrences so outlandish, after all? How often has some reiteration of this happened in our cities, or have we at least read about in newspapers?

Akhil Yadav’s eponymous novella in Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers is a farce about the incredible things that happen in our incredible India. The holy city of Varanasi is faced with a generational dilemma – what is to be done about the women in prostitution who have taken over Manduadih? A DIG who has fallen into disrepute takes it upon himself to clean up the city’s moral landscape but he runs into resistance not only from the sex-workers themselves but also from two pesky journalists – C Antaratma (a play on conscience?) and Prakash (light?).

But his troubles are small in comparison to the sex-workers who face insurmountable challenges in forms of unchecked urbanisation, bureaucratic corruption, and lifelong social stigma. A cracker of an opening story, written with...

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