Translated fiction: Gyan Chaturvedi’s novel about the free-market economy and excessive consumerism

The suburbs were flooding.

The Bazaar was everywhere. Quite an embarrassing time this was.

It was a flood. Life was surrounded by the Bazaar, everywhere. It was the Bazaar that was flowing everywhere. Laughter, conversation, day-to-day dealings among people, literature, culture, folk, religion, thought, and music – everything was flowing with the flow of the Bazaar.

Since this was a flood, the suburbs should have been scared, right? People should have gathered everything they could find and moved on to a safer place, right? But such was the bizarre nature of these times that instead of panicking and getting scared, people in the suburbs were celebrating the flooding. The Bazaar kept on expanding. Flooding works on this principle. When it spreads, it swallows everything that comes in its way. The Bazaar had spread so far and so fast that the places which didn’t even have a market were under its sway now. But nobody was concerned with this. Rather, suburbs were enjoying all of this, and everybody was happy.

The Bazaar had barged into the suburbs, which were flooding. Everybody in the suburbs was cheering and enjoying this from the sidelines, thinking that this was just another dog and pony show. And then the...

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