‘Once Elephants Lived Here’: Geetanjali Shree’s stories play with ideas and readers’ expectations

There is an intriguing instability in the world of Once Elephants Lived Here. The stories start out in places that seem familiar, with characters you have run into variations of already, until suddenly, the real morphs into the fantastic.

A strangely expansive sky turns into a lover. An ambitious young man attempts to find his place in a city that has cleaved into two. A woman starts her morning with a routine walk and cannot stop. A man sits in his friend’s house, waiting anxiously, watching shadows. A couple finds the beginning and the end of their love story in a graveyard. A mother finds joy in sakura blossoms, millions of miles away from home. With the surreal skirting the edges of everyday existence in contemporary spaces, these stories defy easy classification and easy consumption. They unfold across a range of settings – a city that promises to be a superpower, a village that has not let go of older ways of life, a generic housing society, a beautiful hamlet in Kerala, a new planet, an ordinary hotel room, a train in Japan. Their concerns are just as varied. Like the rest of Geetanjali Shree’s fiction, this anthology of 11 stories, first published in...

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