Paasa Palat - Rafaa Dalvi - ★★★

AUTHOR: Rafaa Dalvi

GENRE: Hindi Flash Fiction Anthology

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A twisty collection of short stories in conversational Hindi.

This anthology has forty flash-fiction–length stories, most of which have a twist at the end. The stories are quite dark, ranging from crimes, psych suspense, thrillers and low horror.

‘Paasa Palat’ is somewhat like turning the tables or changing the tide. Thus, in each story, you have the ‘paasa palat’ happening at the end. Sometimes, it works well; at times, it feels predictable and/or farfetched.

One interesting trivia is that every story is titled after a Bollywood crime movie, and arranged in the order of the movie’s release year. I discovered the first bit while reading the collection; the second was revealed to me by the author.

Most of these stories are set in the urban locale of Mumbai. So the Hindi you get herein is not the formal polished Hindi of North & Central India. The stories are in conversational Hindi (which is fine), but contains many English words that seem anomalous in a Hindi work. Words like ‘white’ and ‘quit’, and even worse - ‘crotch’, look weird when they pop up in Hindi fiction in the Devanagari script. After all, they do have Hindi equivalents, then why the English words? Well, I suppose I should be grateful that it isn’t in Bambaiya Hindi – that would have been comical! But if you pick up this collection to get a genuine Hindi experience, you will be dissatisfied.

Another thing that bugged me was that many of the stories were a part of  'Chasing Nirvana', an English flash fiction collection by the same author. I had read the English work a couple of years ago, so when the Hindi stories started looking familiar, it took me some time to work out the reason why I kept getting the feeling of déjà vu. I think this took away greatly from my experience, because what should have been surprise twists were already known to me.

(Note: On seeing my feedback, the author clarified to me that Chasing Nirvana has since been revamped, and there are no more any common stories between the two collections. But as I had read the original version, my experience stands.)

As always, I rated the stories individually, but most of them fell in the mid-range for me. (My favourites were ‘Gupt’, ‘Sangharsh’, and ‘Kaun’.) I had enjoyed ‘Chasing Nirvana’ far more, possibly also because I can process better in English. So the language also had a role to play in my relative dissatisfaction with this work.

All in all, a decent collection, and one that I might have enjoyed more had I not already read the English version.

Recommended to Hindi short fiction lovers who won’t fuss about modernised language.

Do note that this isn’t for children; the content makes it suitable only for adults.

(The adult content looked so odd to my eyes because I've never read anything except shudh saaf-suthri desi kahaniyan in Hindi fiction. 😂)

The book is available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers in India.