Children of a Faraway War

May 1, 2020
Short stories and poetry tell a tale of a world that's recognizable yet very different from our own. A grandfather tries to tell an interviewer what it's like to have lost so many of his family members to "the Incident," but a language barrier keeps everything but the simplest words from getting through. In another story, a drunken man wanders the streets, complaining about being alone and missing his brother. He's attacked by a strange woman who yells things that he only half-understands and then gives him money to take a cab home, if he promises never to return to the area. In still another tale, the Chief's First Wife speaks to her dishonored first son while another wife gives birth to a son who might redeem the abusive Chief in the tribe's eyes. These and 13 other short stories take place in different parts of this fictional setting, and they come together to draw a much larger portrait of that world. In this fragmented way, Bhat pens an intriguingly unusual type of novel. As the short stories and occasional examples of poetry weave together, they effectively show how people live very different lives in the aftermath of tragedy but experience very similar emotions. These tales of grief, loneliness, homesickness, and vengeance are incredibly compelling, and the author's piecemeal technique has the effect of making the overall story easier to digest--especially considering how deep and emotional some of the individual tales are. Overall, readers will find this work to be one that's not merely worth a read, but also a reread, in order to get a better sense of the sum of its parts. A compelling mosaic of worldbuilding.

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