Short Story: Incurable (Originally written in Hindi by Hansa Deep and translated by Patricia Wood)

This powerful short story originally written by Hansa Deep in Hindi and translated into English by Patricia Wood shows how life can be beautiful for one and all with a touch of humanity and love.

As I locked the door to the house and stepped out, some new faces appeared in the one next door. For a few years now, I had been seeing the changing of so many neighbours, like day to night, as if all the seasons were passing in the space of a few months. When someone’s new face would arrive, and they would shake hands and say, “We are your neighbours,” I didn’t know what was happening. Well, these neighbours were something different—they seemed like they were like me. To look at their faces, it was logical to guess they might be Indian. I’ve been mistaken on this question many times. Sometimes you look at someone and it seems that they might be from India, but they come from somewhere else. Sometimes the answer was they were from Sri Lanka, sometimes Bangladesh, and sometimes from Pakistan. This time, it turned out there was no mistake: these Indian faces had come from India’s capital, Delhi.