A note on the issue: Imagining the stories of our time

Storytelling, or re-creating worlds that readers may not always find their way into, is what we do at Lounge week after week. “The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse,” George Saunders wrote in an essay in 2007, which I think applies to fiction, non-fiction, journalism and other forms of art. We tell stories to understand the world we live in and well-told stories help us empathise with others, seeing their lives through our lens and the larger world through theirs. And so, for the first week of the year, we hand the job of storytelling to some of the country’s most interesting writers of fiction, inviting them to look ahead and tell us how they see the world or what they imagine it to be.

Also read: Lounge Fiction Special 2025: ‘Kukri’ by Vikram Shah

As we do every year, we shared a simple prompt with authors—usually one that reflects the mood of the year gone by—and requested them to re-interpret it for the year ahead. This year’s prompt is “War and Peace”, part literary, part philosophical and very real in the world we inhabit right now. We have wars, both physical and metaphorical, raging around us—the conflicts in different regions that stream on to our screens, the climate events caused by habitat destruction and human activity, the continued erosion of human rights, apprehensions about Artificial Intelligence replacing humans, and the anxieties that all these as well as the routine business of everyday living fan within us. And yet, there is also hope, in the many pockets of peace and decency hidden in plain sight. 

We left it to the writers and artists to interpret as they liked. Our only condition was that the story be previously unpublished and written specially for Lounge. It resulted in the stories in the pages that follow, stories that are thought-provoking, moving and timeless.

For the first time this year, we had an open call, which we circulated on social media, inviting readers to write for us. The cascade of responses made for an overflowing inbox of joyful reading. More than 100 of you sent us original short stories, creatively interpreting the prompt “War and Peace” to fictionalise everything from private battles with health and memory, and struggles for personal liberty to larger tussles for social justice.

We were to pick just one, but ended up being unable to choose, and thus we have two stories. The one that stood out for all of us with its strong writing and humour is Gas by Nikhita Thomas, in which she tackles the idea of the temporary truces we strike everyday through silences and simple gestures. The other we picked is Prashanth Srivatsa’s Ocean of Spines, again an inventive take on the prompt. Devika Sundar and Asage bring more layers to each story with their art. Some of these stories are grim, others are wistful, but all of them, I think, push us towards imagining the possible other worlds we could live in—whether in war or in peace.

Write to the editor at shalini.umachandran@htlive.com 

@shalinimb

Also read: Lounge Fiction Special 2025: ‘Gas’ by Nikhita Thomas