Review | Paul Zacharia’s ‘50 Stories’ is a rich blend of the ordinary and the bizarre

For more than five decades, acclaimed Malayalam writer Paul Zacharia has been unsettling conventions, challenging certainties and reshaping the possibilities of the short story. Fittingly, this anthology of 50 stories written over the years provides a sweeping introduction to one of Indian literature’s most inventive and iconoclastic voices.

Zacharia’s forte is the short story. His work is genre-defying, blending dark humour, magical realism, surrealism, satire and philosophical inquiry into narratives that evade easy categorisation. Comparisons with Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges are not entirely misplaced. Zacharia, like Borges, delights in blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, the sacred and the profane, the ordinary and the extraordinary.