This is a book that holds a country torn open inside its pages. Behind it are two pain points—the brutalisation of an 8-year-old in a temple in Kashmir in 2018 by men-wolves, and the story of a young Hiroshima survivor who folded origami cranes in the hope that heaven would hear and heal her when she reached the magical figure of one thousand.
Heaven did not hear the cries of Asifa Bano or the Japanese girl but Pallavi Aiyar hoped this book would prove the equivalent of a thousand cranes. She was inspired to curate the anthology when she herself tried folding a piece of paper and she found that it was like “folding the depravities of the world and transforming them into a weightless thing of beauty”.
The resultant book explores different aspects of the current situation in India through verse, essays and short stories, bringing together writers, film-makers, poets of the calibre of Anjum Hasan, Radhika Jha, Sudeep Charkravarti, Srijato and Janice Pariat and activists like Salil Tripathi. Each of the 23 pieces puts a different perspective on...
