For someone like me who grew up speaking Hindi at home, watching Bollywood films and playing Antakshari, and is more familiar with Kabir and Mirabai than John Lennon and Lady Gaga, the near absence of Hindi literature from my reading list is something I have been utterly embarrassed about. While reading books in English translation is not the same as reading the original, it seems like a great way to ease myself into a world that I have wanted to explore and inhabit.

Anil Yadav’s Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers, translated by Vaibhav Sharma, got me hooked from the very first page. It is a collection of five short stories and one novella, all set in North India, combining vivid imagery with emotional depth and piercing social critique. 

The volume left me feeling like I had just polished off some wholesome chaat on a street corner — bursting with flavours, sweet, tangy, pungent, that delight you and also make you tear up. 

The title comes from the novella ‘Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers’, which takes up the entire first half of the collection. Set in “Banaras, the city of dharma, culture and trickery”, it is a satirical takedown of a policeman who is suspected to have killed his wife or driven her to suicide. Ramashankar Tripathi begins to frequent temples and ashrams, commissions a drinking fountain in memory of his wife, funds institutions for the welfare of women and children, and writes a general knowledge textbook for youth aspiring to join the Indian Police Service. 

These overzealous attempts to manage and spruce up his public image are at once shady and comic. If Tripathi is not creepy enough for you, wait till you meet Shreevilas Nihalani in the same novella. He is the managing director of a construction company, and wants to build a “morality bridge” from where tourists can see “the daily-life activities of the prostitutes below” using binoculars. He wants to rob the city’s traditional sex workers of their income, and replace them with “smart girls from entertainment companies” to turn the pilgrimage centre into an “open-air peep show”.

Essence of the original

The short story titled ‘The Folk Singer’s Swan Song’ exposes how schools devalue the skills and life experiences that children acquire at home or outside the classroom. The protagonist, Janam, is considered “as dumb as a donkey” though he can sing songs, recite limericks, graze animals, work as a porter, and make percussion sounds with his mouth. He is judged as inferior because he struggles with multiplication tables, and inverts letters while writing. The worst part, however, is that the teachers at his school not only ask students to wash utensils, clean bicycles, massage their feet, and run errands, but they also “fondle the cheeks, butts and chests of the students”.

Two of the stories — ‘The Magic of Certain Old Clothes’ and ‘R.J. Saheb’s Radio’ — are portraits of heterosexual marriages sinking under the weight of deception. The husband in the former rejects the idea of wearing second-hand clothes when his wife suggests it, but he is secretly addicted to buying them and hoards so many that his lie is about to get caught. The latter features a woman who thinks that her husband is sighing with emotion when he is simply uneasy due to “a slow rise of gas inside him”. When she hugs him, he worries about “spreading an unpleasant smell at such a delicate moment”. The author juxtaposes pathos with unexpected humour.

I chanced upon this book because the translator was mentored by Daisy Rockwell, who won the International Booker Prize for translating Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand. In the translator’s note, Sharma writes, “Through consistent practice and training with my mentor, I came to understand that the purpose of translation isn’t simply to preserve sentence structure or individual words, but to convey the essence of the original.”

He appears to have internalised this lesson because the English prose flows with ease and confidence, and does not come across as a pale shadow of the original, apologising for the alleged sin of being lost in translation.

The literary critic also writes poems, essays and short stories. 

Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers

Anil Yadav, trs Vaibhav Sharma

Ebury Press

₹299