Swept Up

Welcome to Fiction: Exclusive short fiction stories by emerging authors from the global majority and beyond. Access the Audio Read version of this story - in three parts - directly on Spotify for Podcasters.

To them, you’re a small figure on the rocking chair made of western wood, nestled in a world often hostile to the outsider, cocooned in your room with liquor and meat and fabric they don't recognise, speaking another language, praying to another god.

Swept Up is a short fiction story by Rhea Dhanbhoora, first released as part of a three-part series in September 2024. They can be found online: Swept Up — Part One: Summer, Swept Up — Part Two: Monsoon, and Swept Up — Part Three: Winter.

Summer

A shiny new copy of Inglorious Empire is weighed down by well-worn copies of Kim and the Raj Quartet. A dog-eared copy of Vanity Fair held together with brown tape balances precariously on the crumbling shelf of a preloved rosewood bookcase, flanked by a first edition collection by Keki Daruwalla, above an antique assemblage of Shakespeare’s best, its gold-gilded pages shimmering in the shadows of a trailing sun on a slow descent into the murky sea outside the big red gates. “It’s a good book,” your sister says when she gives it to you, and you make a mental note to read the ‘real story of British India,’ before forgetting about it on the 19^th century bookcase by the gold Regency mirror. 

A glass of whiskey straight up for your friend in the floral scarf, yours on the rocks, pistachio shells clinking clumsily in a Waterford meant only for display and a handful of salty wafers soak up the last dregs of light on a careworn coffee table as you move to draw the curtains, the graceful 60’s swing of your hips interrupted by an unscheduled stumble. “This bloody thing,” you mutter, bent down nursing the stubbed toe. You imagine the howls of orthodox members of the faith rising up around the lawns outside, protesting the idea of your foot touching, even accidentally, a depiction of Zarathustra. Crafted into a stained-glass window once carefully unhinged from an old agiary and saved for future framing, it stands idly in the living room, watching visitors discuss rising real estate rates of flats by the sea. 

“Like a mausoleum,” your sister says, her nose wrinkled as she brings in more people to see this house you don’t want to sell that has been on the market for a decade, she pauses to point proudly at a rare original — a colourful canvas with the distinctive impressionist swathes and swipes of Jehangir Sabavala that stares down at an old Windsor rocker. 

“Tandarosti,” your friend in the floral headscarf says. She clinks her glass against yours in a traditional toast to good health. “Tandarosti,” you reply, thinking of the first time you heard your grandfather say it after you and your sister moved permanently into his flat by the sea.

The rhythmic hum of protests interrupts your sunset ritual of whiskey and wafers, chiming in with the best of Dean Martin crackling out of the hand-me-down KEFs that cleverly conceal ageing yellow floor tiles. “So sad, all this trouble outside,” your friend says, sipping slowly on her drink as the evening news blares out of open windows across the lawn. You nod absently, thinking about your sister, who predicted the trouble the year they banned carol singers. Too western, they said to the native Catholics. The warnings have not hit home for you: the slow, steady descent, the State and bureaucrats working hand-in-hand to acquire privately owned land. Private hospitals become public dumping grounds, bungalows by the sea become construction sites for hotels that are never built. Religious spaces are taken over under the guise of national welfare. When they come for the land inside gated communities, residents shrug their shoulders, tired of unresolved, decade-long court cases and unable to continue to keep them at bay with bribes due to their own dwindling resources. Trees are felled and walls crumble, but you swing back on your rocker, convinced it’s just a phase. “It will pass,” you say to your friend, who disagrees.

The pomegranate pink of dusk is fading into a haze of purple smog, signalling the firing up of stoves, shuffling of slippers and collective rustle of paisley silk, printed cotton and white muslin as families slip into stiff-backed chairs at old wooden dining tables.

Outside, orange flags pause by the crumbling stone pillars, nodding cheerfully to the watchmen and flashing their fangs in slimy smiles as they make way for the endangered inhabitants of the colony to slip back into the big red gates in time for dinner. Waves of saffron move with the wind, spreading serpentine agendas in a different direction. 

You stir your solitary stew by the kitchen window, listening to the rumble fade into the distance as outdoors, the colony dips into silence.

Monsoon 

You stare at the painting one last time, remembering childhood tales of a British-Indian retreat from Kabul that were once mentioned as a footnote, now successfully scrubbed from textbooks. “It was his favourite,” you mutter, staring up at the print of the famous grey skies of Jalalabad. “It’s a worthless, printed version of an old abomination,” your sister barks, seeing only another horrific glorification of a problematic empire. “It’s art,” you do not say, closing your eyes to commit Elizabeth Butler’s The Remnants of an Army to memory while you watch it being carried away with the rest of your grandfather’s belongings. The flat your parents left you in when they decided they didn’t want to be parents is being cleared out, “decades too late,” your sister insists. She’s getting rid of anything that can be seen as anti-national, under the guise of clearing old memories you’ve locked yourself in, as if by preserving his possessions you could forget you’re alone now.

Wet earth masks the smell of trouble brewing outside, and you ignore the slight whiff of tension in the air, breathe in the familiar memory of white desi corn, sprinkled with chilli and lime. You mention the fond memory to your sister. Monsoon reminds you of roasted corn and drinks on the balcony with your grandfather. It reminds her of false promises and absent parents. 

“You should get rid of this alcohol, you know you don’t have a permit for all these bottles.” 

“I’m working on it,” you say, pouring yourself another drink, resisting the urge to remind her that there is no law against liquor, or for permits. “It doesn’t matter that there’s no law,” she raises an eyebrow, reading your thoughts. Better safe than sorry, she is thinking.

Your friend in the floral scarf insists that your sister stay for the sunset ritual of whiskey and wafers, and she sighs, losing the battle to sip on a cup of Earl Grey indoors with the blinds drawn. “It’s not safe in this climate,” she mumbles. “They don’t care about us,” you insist. What existed once on the fringes of the world you know is moving uncomfortably close to the big red gates, emboldened, no longer hidden behind a smokescreen of political propaganda, the attacks rationalised, often even celebrated. Fall in line or into oblivion, the world seemed to be crying. 

The news doesn’t help settle your friend. Warnings of troublemakers navigating a minefield of minorities were abound. They moved in packs on screen and outside, looking for the weakest links to pluck from already withering stems in a bid to cement an unchallenged dominion.

Billboards lining the promenade by the sea outside shuddered as the television flickered. “Take our home back from the outsiders,” it seemed to say too cheerfully, thanks in part to glitzy PR firms and the purchased press.

Your friend in the floral scarf stares quietly at the television, which doesn’t mention the people who rise up and fall in vain against the violent downpour, quickly silenced with force or the false promise of financial reward — often both. For now, the names of victims disappear as quickly as their frames are put to rest. “We should do whatever the majority does,” your sister insists, sipping on her Earl Grey on a little chair behind your Windsor rocker. “Kids these days,” you reply, echoing your grandfather’s idea of the loss of ambition, wealth, will and numbers being the only reason you’re unable to fight back. “Easy targets, with all this old real estate,” your friend in the floral headscarf mumbles. Tucking one of the few remaining cafe au lait strands tightly under a mass of silver sticking out from a blue Venetian silk scarf, you sigh, and insist things would be different if kids would marry within the community, have their own children, add to the numbers. You forget you’ve done no such thing.

You close your eyes for a second to block out the images of the riots caused by an imagined loss of power even in the most powerful. The tyranny of the past snakes around them, its tongue splaying poison, its victims tangled in a web of violence. Seventy years after the old, wrinkled skin of colonialism is six feet under, they’re still wound up in its memories. 

“But we are no threat,” you tell your sister. 

“Lock your doors,” she insists. 

“Just another angry politician,” you whisper into the emptiness as the sound of locks clicking rises up around the gated community. 

Winter

A security guard scurries out of the safe confines of the little stone cottage by the gate to check whether it’s been properly padlocked. The old lady in the floral headscarf nods from the crack in her lace curtains as he squints up to the tall biscuit-coloured building for approval, before scurrying back into the cottage where intercoms click and hiss in terror. 

“Just three rounds today, we shouldn’t be out after dark,” the tank-and-tracksuit ladies whisper to one another as they fast-walk up and down the slopes usually buzzing with children, cycles, skateboards and rollerblades — empty and silent today. 

“Will they be safe in their stone cottage by the gate?”

They whisper so the guards don’t hear them. They take another turn past the big red gates, in a hurry to get back indoors because of the warnings flickering in big red letters across their television sets, unwilling to sacrifice their post-meal workout. 

“They were safer here during the last riots,” the women nod to one another. They are both old enough to remember the unrest of the early ’90s, when they had huddled up in cabins that flanked the tall stone pillars with the afarghans decorating the tops. As if simply standing by the symbols of a group everyone forgot about when trouble started, would be enough to protect them. The troublemakers had not bothered with them — what was the point? Drawing rusty knives and stained axes against one another in a crowd outside, they parted in waves to let stray residents unaware of the trouble slip back in and lock the gates behind them. The small, eccentric community was no threat as the rest continued to pit one political party against another, let out communal cries of war, and shouts for reservation.

You watch the tank-and-tracksuit ladies scurry home before their usual six rounds, thinking absently about the mosaic of cultures and communities woven into the seven islands that make a city. They appear suddenly swathed in a single robe, afraid to step into their own shoes for fear their toes would be set aflame. Your little archipelago, no longer yours, is under siege again. 

An outdated Maruti-800 crashes at the gate, a mess of limbs caught up in its wreckage as it veers into the stone pillars, forced into demise on its way back inside. No one bats an eyelid. An air of resignation mixes with the cool evening breeze. Dispassionate faces stare out into the flames as they bar their windows and padlock their doors to keep trouble at bay, watching the streets burn and trying to remember schoolboy terms to help them masquerade as one with the masses under a single language — that they didn’t speak. Policemen with pockets overflowing step back into their cabins in silence, putting their feet up and new flatscreen televisions on to drown out the noise. We didn't hear a thing, they would say later.

You swing back on your rocker, watching a worried mother pull a little girl in a polka dot dress away from the window. The girl resists the pull, curious about these new voices and sounds outside. The most discontent she has seen has been her mother arguing with the fisherwoman over an overpriced pomfret. She had stood, watching the slimy thing flipped around in the air, stray scales hitting the grey tiled lobby, its eyeball bouncing and rolling into the grills between the double-gated lift that beeped louder and louder while an old couple on the fourth floor yelled for it, the fisherwoman yelling her price, her mother yelling it down, doors rattling, an angry footfall down the stairs….

Now, you follow her eyes as she hides behind her lace curtains, watching an axe hack at the padlock she has never seen on the red gates a flurry of moustaches and-unevenly bleached red hair scream to be let in. Humans are the most dangerous animal, your grandfather would say. The flags sweep in and up the winding lane. Cape buffalos charging in one unintelligible mass, circling, stalking, finally ready to jab their horns into unfamiliar territory. 

The Marks & Spencer scarf around your neck tightens as a Bombay breeze whips across the sea. The evening ritual of whiskey and wafers passed down from one generation to the next had not stopped for an ongoing illness you knew, leaning back on your rocker, that her husband would not recover from, but your friend in the floral scarf refuses now to continue to sip on substances on the balcony. Rather, dips into the last of a precious box of Thorntons truffles behind her lace curtains in a biscuit-coloured building by the gate. The steady clink of ice signals the start of a solitary evening with your whiskey, a State-approved chicken sandwich and the shiny new copy of Inglorious Empire you’ve finally begun to read, waiting for the flags to turn the corner and move on. 

The city is uncharacteristically quiet. No hawkers line the pavements, no cars blare their horns and no fisherwomen screech by the gates. 

“Trouble is brewing,” your sister whispers.

You wonder why there has been no milk, eggs or newspaper as late as 11am. The sky is an angry orange cloud hovering over the sea, the sun hanging lower than usual as if afraid to be seen. 

Stay indoors, news channels warn. Mothers drag their children away from windows that can be shattered by sharp rocks. Open balconies can be targeted with acid balloons. The nation-wide strike, the bandh they call it, is a success. But still, you sit on your old rocker by the window, certain you’re safe behind the big red gates, even when the mass of orange gains pace. You are no threat. You dissolved, like sugar in a glass of milk, the moment you were told to. 

To them, you’re a small figure on the rocking chair made of western wood, nestled in a world often hostile to the outsider, cocooned in your room with liquor and meat and fabric they don't recognise, speaking another language, praying to another god. A lone figure daring to rock back and forth to unfamiliar music on the balcony when you should have been cowering behind your unpatriotic Persian lace. The old woman with thighs uncovered, her face painted. They march forward, and you wait for them to stop at the big red gates, to turn the corner onto the next street. “Tandarosti,” you whisper, raising a shaky glass of golden elixir to the saffron-stained sky.

Only mixed in with a pile of dark, aged wood that was once a Windsor rocker do you realise, things are different now.