Between the Lines: Objects in South Asian Writing

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes about objects as what remains when people leave, when histories fracture, and when memory refuses to stay contained.

Sometimes what stays is not what was most valuable, but what was closest at hand, like a cup left on a windowsill, a shirt folded and kept back not because it is needed but because it cannot yet be given away, a trunk that no longer opens easily, its contents undisturbed for years, as though time itself might spill out if it were forced; and slowly, almost without announcement, these objects begin to shift in meaning, no longer functioning as things that were used, but as quiet afterlives of what has been lost.

In South Asian writing, absence rarely arrives as emptiness. It gathers instead around things. What was carried, what was left behind, what could not be taken, and what was never returned, so that even when a life is interrupted or a place is abandoned, something small persists, not enough to reconstruct what was lost, but enough to prevent it from disappearing entirely.

To write objects, in this context, is to write what remains when narrative itself begins to fall short.