I went to Mehboob Studios, Mumbai because I was nominated at the India Film Project festival. It felt like I was hurling myself into an unknown expanse. It also felt like the right thing for me to do. There was also the hope and desire of meeting more creative people like me and bringing back memories of a festival that recognized my (years of) effort and dedication. I returned with much more.
On 25th October, in Mumbai, my short story The Cursed Woman of Teen Bagh won Platinum, the first prize in the Short Story category of the IFP 50 Hour Writing Challenge, Season 16. About 1,800 writers from 22 countries entered the writing challenge. Fifteen of us were nominated for short story. The jury included the publisher Chiki Sarkar, the novelist Prayaag Akbar and the screenwriter Sumit Roy, alongside Karan Anshuman, Abhay Koranne, Rashmi Bansal and Tara Khandelwal.
Fifty Hours, a Thousand Words
The IFP 50 Hour Writing Challenge opens at 8pm on a Friday night and closes fifty hours later, on Sunday. Every writer gets the same theme and the same compulsory element, and the short story has to stay under a thousand words. The theme this year was “Not Quite What You Think.” My story came in at 980 words.
The day and hour caught me at a chaotic time. I should have known better but life doesn’t ask you for directions. It points and you follow. There was important work that couldn’t wait and then travel. Throw in some soap opera-ish drama moments and you get the picture that ‘these 50 hours’ were asking for much more than a story and its submission.
I thought of giving up, dropping out, letting it linger and pass to finally say: oh well, there will be another day, another chance, another right moment.
I can safely say, a lost moment will never come back.
The Story I Can’t Share Yet
The story belongs to the IFP anthology first, so I’ll keep it under wraps until you can read it there. What I can share is the kind of woman I keep returning to in my fiction. She’s alone, carrying her own weight, surrounded by people who are certain they understand her.
They’re wrong about almost all of it.
A village decides what a woman’s tears mean before she’s done crying.
What Villages Do With a Woman’s Grief
A woman’s grief doesn’t belong to her. It belongs to everyone watching her. How long does she cry, what color sari does she wear, whether she laughs at a wedding. Someone is always keeping count.
Relatives arrive sympathetic and leave with a hundred opinions. Men lean in when no one has asked them to stop and help. A neighbor explains, kindly, that a lonely woman can’t manage her life all alone.
No one calls this greed. Everyone calls it concern.
Which leaves one simple question. What happens when a woman realizes the whole village is already misreading her?
The Same Soil
The story shares its soil with my novel Cobra Orchard. You don’t need the novel to read the story, and the story doesn’t give the novel away in any manner. In that soil, holy men sell fear by the season. Families call control protection.
Women learn early that the truth is often less useful than what people already believe.
Fear of a curse is older than any science lesson, which is why superstition in India outlived the smartphone.
If women misread by their own villages make you curious, explore Cobra Orchard and meet three women bound by a sinister guru’s prophecy.
What Comes Next
The story will appear in the IFP winners’ anthology. Platinum also brings an online mentorship with members of the jury next month.
While Cobra Orchard engages with new readers, my second novel Karmic Devi is making its way to all of you. No woman in my stories is left unheard. Looking forward to learning and evolving while finding my own way with words.
Thank you to IFP, and to a jury that read a woman more carefully than her own village did.
Has anyone ever decided what your grief meant before you did?
Tell me in the comments. And if someone you know has been read wrongly by their whole family, send them this post.
Three women. Two timelines. One curse that refuses to die. Set in the shadow-drenched villages of Uttar Pradesh, India — across the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller about secrets buried so deep, even the earth forgot them. Read Cobra Orchard on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Prime Paperback.
More of this, every month.
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Terveen Gill is a writer who has always been drawn to the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath ordinary lives. A Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer, she is also a graphic novel script writer, indie filmmaker, and a former engineer.
Her debut psychological thriller Cobra Orchard is the culmination of that instinct: a dark, immersive novel about three women, a sinister guru, and secrets buried so deep they have begun to rot.
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