The Island of the Day Before: Stories

By Zuni Chopra

A little matchstick girl seeks a companion

 

An otter lies in wait for fish in the sea and wonders about humans and their way of life

 

A merchant and a gnome set out on an extraordinary adventure to deal with an impending war

 

An island wakes up to a hovering storm and an untold danger

With The Island of the Day Before, Zuni Chopra takes the readers on an extraordinary and consistently unpredictable voyage. Boldly experimental in terms of themes and forms, these whimsical tales - prose, poetry, flash fiction - of the everyday and the extraordinary, the fantastical and the mundane, will keep haunting you long after you have read them.This is a work of exceptional imagination from a young, prodigious talent - a rising star in the literary firmament.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper India
• Release date: Aug 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9789353022884

Zuni Chopra

Zuni Chopra is a seventeen-year-old author who has published two poetry collections. Her first novel, The House That Spoke, released in January 2017. This is her fourth published work. She has contributed articles to Vogue India and Hindustan Times. Zuni has a passion for writing, especially fantasy and poetry, and her favourite authors include Neil Gaiman and Lewis Carroll. Her main source of encouragement and inspiration remains her six dogs.

Book preview

They’ve Got It Wrong

They’ve got it wrong.

Jack was foolish

Red disobedient

Punzie naïve

Ella stubborn

Aladdin a thief

Goldy indecisive

Puss a rotten crook

And Beauty in love with a castle more than a prince.

And yet imagine what we’d have left of them

If they’d never strayed from the path.

Because, between you and I,

Granny’s house

Burnt down long ago.

The End of the Lane

Often, when the wind grows rough and angry on an untameable night, the pub at the end of our road is full up with song and feast and drunken hearts. I walked down on one such night, my shoes squelching up to my ankles in the mud, my cook having returned home for the night, my dog having gone with her. The sky was charcoal, bits of ashes swirling off into the horizon. I looked for the moon but only saw flashes of its once-proud light. It seemed as though it was screaming at me from all directions of the sky.

The pub door was ajar, heat and light flooding through it. I neared it, the sensation of burning up drawing down upon me.

The pub surprised me: quiet were the ten or so men inside, each drowning in his drink, the bartender’s elbow slipping against the bar with the weight of his own head.

‘Evening!’ I called out, though it really wasn’t.

They glanced up at me, some interested, some entertained, some stifling their anger at having the façade of comfortable silence shattered.

‘Afternoon,’ called a grizzled old man in a black overcoat, the left side of his face marred with streaks of explosions, his left arm swathed in bandages of dirty white. Afternoon it certainly wasn’t, yet I had the sense that time was playing along.

‘Charming spot,’ I remarked, as though seeing it for the first time, straying over to the bartender. He snorted under his breath.

I asked for a drink and I got one. Silence had fallen again, yet this time it was an expectant silence. I turned to find watchful eyes on me, which I thought was rather unfair. I’d meant to start a conversation, not lead one!

I was spared further internal deliberation by the quiet yellow man up at the front, wearing incredibly little for the weather, tinged red eyes sunken into his sallow face betraying he had other ways of warming himself. He hiccoughed, beginning, ‘Ye kno … hic … it’s been … hic … ser … veral days since me was laid off.’

‘Yeah, and each of those ser … veral days you’ve been back here!’ shot back the bartender, chuckling.

‘Yeah, but y-you know why me … hic … wa … sh laid off?’

‘Because you’re an idiot,’ a smartly dressed man at the front of the bar chimed in. His suit was clean (though not well-ironed), his eyes glinted like silver, and there was no trace of stubble upon his slowly wrinkling face. ‘You upset your superiors with rubbish talk and refused to do any work.’

The man in yellow lifted a shaky finger to point in his direction. ‘Now, look here, I don’t know … hic … what a superior ish, but I never hic … up … shet nobody.’

‘Ya, went off telling stories, Archie,’ a man in similar yellow remarked from his place against the only well-lit wall. It was incredible how the same uniform on him seemed bright (if a little dusty) and lighter than the air around it, while it seemed to weigh his drunken colleague down like lead. He had a short yet messy mop of hair, hanging down behind his neck. His eyes were small and beady, yet so far apart that they failed to give him the look of a sensible man.

‘Did not!’ Archie retorted.

‘Ya did and ya know it, Archie.’ He turned to the rest of the bar, his drink quite forgotten in his hand. ‘Archie here was meant to be drillen’ the pipes, like the rest of us, but it’s hot and murky, so Archie says he won’t work no more. Then he sits on the pipe we was meant to be drillen’, so we can’t drill it, and starts tellin’ ghost stories like a senile grandmum for the next hour.’

‘No supervisor stopped him?’ I put in between sips, partly curious, partly eager for the pub not to forget that it’d been I who’d begun the chatter.

‘There weren’t no one there but us, ’twas teatime.’

‘Till they came back and fired him,’ I concluded, smacking the bottom of my glass down on the table, telling it for all the world as though I’d been there to see it.

‘Nope. Till he walked into the café where they was havin’ tea and started blubberin’ out his story to the boss. In the middle o’ our shift!’

A chorus of laughter rang out, such ignorance and sincerity a pleasant surprise in the contorted world we knew.

‘But you know why me did it?’ gurgled Archie. ‘Because me stories real. True.’

‘No one’s gonna believe that rot!’ called the bartender, wiping down a glass so cracked along the edge that I wondered if it could survive its cleaning. He turned to the rest of the bar, leaning over the countertop with glittering eyes and chubby, smiling cheeks. ‘You know, he been in here yesterday talking about the phantom at the end of the lane.’

‘The phantom?’ I chuckled, drawn in by this man and his stories already.

‘Oh tell that story!’ called the man in the crisp suit, his stiffness dissipating slightly. ‘You tell it so very well.’

An experienced man in this sort of thing, I am quickly able to tell a compliment from mockery. Archie, thankfully, was not.

‘Oh … ish nothin’ …’ He went even redder, his glass slopping out of his shaking hand. ‘Onsh … upon a happier time … even though this story isn’t happy, innit?’

The man, with his grizzled face, and his coat, huffed loudly.

‘So dish man’s goin’ ’ome to his ugly wife. He’sh walkin’ ’ome and he sees a weird … shiny … thing at the end of the lane.’

Here he paused to throw his arms up and suspend them so high that his shoulders knocked against his jaw. I heard gruff chuckles beginning to emerge.

‘He follows it. It’sh jusht a thing. No face. No arms. No nothin’. At first, he thinks it’sh an angel. Then he feels cold and scared and he knowsh it ain’t. But here’sh the besht bit. He never reaches the damn thing!’

He slapped his hand down on the table, knocking over his glass entirely, so that the deep murky brown liquid spilled over his sleeve, soaking it through. He didn’t move it.

‘He walksh and he walksh, but he never reaches it. And so he thinksh he’ll turn round and go home … but he can’t!’

‘Why can’t he?’ put in his colleague, wiping away a tear of suppressed laughter.

‘’Caush he can’t!’

At this, everyone in the pub roared aloud, overcome. I nearly choked on my beer.

Archie, apparently under the impression that no one could believe him, went on hurriedly, doing his best to convince: ‘No, seriously, he walkshs and walksh … forever! But he’sh forshed to keep walkin’ towardsh it, innie, and he never reachesh, and he never leavesh.’

‘So, where’s he now?’ inquired the man and his coat.

At this, Archie looked dumbfounded. He seemed not to have been expecting such a question. He scratched the left side of his scruffy face, muttering, ‘Still there, innie? Yeah, still there…’

The pub broke into applause. Archie, quite overcome, began blowing kisses in random directions with a most lopsided smile on his face. He then slunk over his outstretched arms and fell asleep right there on the table.

‘He’s right, you know,’ muttered the man with his coat, twirling his finger round the rim of his now empty glass. ‘I’m not saying his stories are true, but they do matter.’

‘Why couldn’t they be true?’ challenged his colleague at once, defensive as though taking up the mantle of a fight. An efficient scoff from behind us conveyed the suit’s opinion quite clearly. The man began to reply.

‘You don’t know what could go on out there,’ the yellow one rushed on, not allowing anyone to interrupt. ‘You never know. It’s a big, bad, scary world. But there’s a lot of goodness in it too. Like stories. And the world works in strange ways. Maybe all us here was meant to hear his stories. Maybe you’ll remember these stories. Maybe someday they’ll become more.’

He took a tentative sip of his now lukewarm drink.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ I burst out, my vote of confidence having an immediate effect as the faces in the bar turned from amused to incredulous.

The man himself hardly dared to believe it, twisting his yellow jacket in his nervous fist.

‘Stories matter,’ I went on, sensing my luck. ‘Stories can hold more than you know. There’s a reason you’ve come back every night to hear these stories. Even from a drunk.’

Far off in the distance, the town clock chimed twelve.

I’d completely lost track of time, and rose in a hurry; I needed to be up early next morning. With the exchange of a few pounds, polite yet sincere goodnights, and a friendly wave around the bar, I was back on the windy road again.

It seemed to have grown slimier since my feet touched it last, and I struggled not to stray off the path. The minutes passed steadily, the night howling around me.

Finally, I glimpsed the creaky wooden doorsteps of home. I fumbled for my key, crossing the blank stretch of road as I did so.

Some intuition, some pull of nature, something deeper than my own spirit, caused my head to turn.

There was something at the end of the road. Something ivory, shimmering with moonlight, giving off gusts of chill. It twisted towards me, moving so slowly I could have almost imagined it.

I smiled, tipped my hat towards it, and turned away, clamouring up to my own front door and finally stepping inside.

The Sailor’s Wife