Lokhi did not know if she felt afraid. This is what she said:

“I look into her featureless face as she looks at me through the black veil, and I can not for the love of my god tell if I am afraid.” (Datlow, p. 285)

This happened in

A Shade of Dusk by Indrapramit Das

This review contains spoilers. Please leave if you don’t want spoilers stealing your pleasure of reading the story.

The narrator of this short story is Lokhi, a woman. She is an elderly spinster, who lives in her. dead parents’ home, together with her ageing sister Pouloma/ Pampi, and her brother-in-law, Chandrasekhar.

After Chandrasekhar died, the younger generation of children, sold the old family home because they said it was too large for the two elderly women, Pampi and Lokhi. They women moved into a flat.

They faced problems like daily electricity cuts in the evenings, because their city’s power grid could not cope with the surge in power requirements in the evenings.

This story is ironic in that the structure of the environment eventually was partly responsible for Pampi’s death. One evening, when the electricity was cut, Pampi walked to the stairwell and met her tragedy. She couldn’t see the dark and she didn’t bring her walking stick with her. She fell headlong down the flight of steps.

Lokhi and another woman, Kalpana, had to wait for light to shine before they could see what happened in the staircase. The neighbors came after they heard the commotion and they shone their torchlights. Everyone saw Pampi was injured. Someone called for the ambulance but Pampi didn’t have a chance. She had died on the spot.

Lokhi reflected on whether it was time for her to die. She and Pampi were inseparable and now, she imagines Pampi would call for her to join her on the other side.

I read A Shade of Dusk, in this anthology, Echoes. I bought this book. It contains 30 short stories by 30 authors.

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