‘That’s A Fire Ant Right There!’: An emotional archive of the common, rural Telugu Muslim lives

That’s A Fire Ant Right There!: Tales from Kavali is not a book that tries to impress you. It doesn’t chase shock, drama, or spectacle. Instead, it does something much harder and much more necessary: it makes you pay attention to the ordinary. Through the voice of a young boy growing up in Kavali, a small coastal town in Andhra Pradesh, Mohammed Khadeer Babu builds a world out of schoolyards, petty jealousies, street gossip, hunger, festivals, and awkward silences. And honestly, that refusal to be “loud” is what makes the book quietly powerful.

A refusal to perform

The English translation by DV Subhashri is central to why this is effective. This wasn’t an easy text to carry across languages – it’s deeply dialect-driven, rooted in the Nellore-Kavali rhythm of Telugu. The translation doesn’t sand down those edges. Instead of flattening everything into neutral, global-friendly English, she keeps the grain of the original. Words like “dadima” and “nannamma” remain, names stay intact, and the prose carries an Indian English cadence that feels lived-in rather than manufactured. As a reader, you feel like you’re stepping into a specific place, not a generic “small Indian town.”

One of the best things about this book is its stubborn refusal to perform...

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