The Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2021

By Kanya D'Almeida, Rémy Ngamije and Carol Farrelly

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, now in its tenth year, is one of the world's most dynamic literary honours. Spanning fifty-four countries, it is awarded for the best short fiction from the Commonwealth regions of Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific. This collection is titled after the overall winning entry by Sri L

• Language: English
• Publisher: Electronic Ink
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911475576

Book preview

ABOUT THE

COMMONWEALTH SHORT

STORY PRIZE

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is administered by the Commonwealth Foundation, through its cultural initiative Commonwealth Writers. Now in its tenth year, the prize is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction (2,000–5,000 words). Regional winners receive GBP 2,500, and the overall winner receives GBP 5,000. It is free to enter and open to citizens of all the countries of the Commonwealth. Entries can be submitted in Bengali, Chinese, English, French, Greek, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili, Tamil, and Turkish, as well as translated into English from any language. The international panel of judges selects one winner from each of the five Commonwealth regions – Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific – one of whom is chosen as the overall winner.

CSSP 2021 Judging Panel

Chair: Zoë Wicomb

Africa: A. Igoni Barrett

Asia: Khademul Islam

Canada and Europe: Keith Jarrett

Caribbean: Diana McCaulay

Pacific: Tina Makereti

About Commonwealth Writers

Commonwealth Writers, the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation, helps develop, support, and connect writers across the world. It believes that well-told stories can help people make sense of events, engage with others, and take action to bring about change. It is committed to the promotion of linguistic diversity, and works with local and international partners to identify and deliver a wide range of cultural projects and platforms, including adda, the online magazine of new writing.

www.commonwealthwriters.org

www.addastories.org

About the Commonwealth Foundation

The Commonwealth Foundation is an intergovernmental organisation established by Member States of the Commonwealth. Uniquely placed at the interface between government and civil society, the Foundation works to support civil society engagement in shaping the policies and decisions that affect people’s lives.

I CLEANED THE –

KANYA D’ALMEIDA

TB Rita loves the story. I don’t know why. It doesn’t have a happy ending.

She doesn’t actually have tuberculosis. The TB stands for tobacco; she says she became addicted to the stuff while wrapping beedis for a living when she was thirteen years old, and now her lungs are like the kitchen sponge, full of holes and black fungus. She keeps a small tin cup under her bed for the sputum. When it’s full, wobbling at the brim, it reminds me of my old life.

Rita’s condition doesn’t stop her from having what she calls a good bloody laugh at my expense. She’s heard the saga so many times she knows it off by heart. When I get to the part about Chooti Baba’s funeral, she starts to giggle. As I proceed towards the dreadful climax, her giggle turns into a cackle and then into a cough – that terrible, broken-lorry-engine cough – until she is laughing and coughing so hard there is spittle and blood on her chin.

I don’t find it funny at all, but I indulge her because she’s dying.

Rita and I share a room at the Carmelite Sisters’ Sanctuary for the Forsaken. All the nuns here have taken a vow of silence and spend their days caring for women who’ve been dismissed, abandoned, maimed, or otherwise left for dead. By night they walk the streets in search of us. That’s how they found me, curled against a stone cross in the Catholic quarter of the Borella Cemetery. It took three of them – strong, those ladies – to get me away from there. Twenty years, I was with Chooti Baba. I couldn’t bear to leave her side.

Twenty years of washing one person’s backside! Rita caws. You should be on your knees thanking God for releasing you.

In a wicked way, she’s right. No one should live as Chooti Baba did. But with her gone, I can’t get hold of my life. No weight to heft, no hair to comb; I’ve become a skin with nothing inside.

It’s helped me fit in here. This is a place for people who have no people. The sanctuary’s front garden is full of flowering creepers. The backyard is a private burial ground. Crooked wooden signposts mark each grave, like a bed of vegetables that never grow. I would like to sit quietly on the verandah overlooking this wilting plot of land, but Rita won’t let me. She chatters like a trapped squirrel, prodding, probing.

Go and bother one of the others, will you? I say.

"Those boring hags? Their stories are nothing compared to yours. This is a cracker, one of the best things I’ve heard in my life."

Rita could be fifty or seventy. She has one of those ageless faces you wouldn’t expect of a chain smoker. I’ve never known a woman with such an appetite for life. She devours it like a bag of hot roasted peanuts, by the fistful.

It’s all thanks to my mother, she says. "A miserable woman if ever there was one! Always working, always complaining. Her curries tasted like sweat and tears. I used to see her crooked back and say to God, just give me one chance and I promise I won’t become like this."

You tried to bargain with God? I ask.

Why not? Bugger wasn’t responding to threats or prayers. I said, ‘okay, here is my best offer: get me out and I’ll give you a good bloody laugh.’

At least you’re a woman of your word, Rita.

She looks me over as if seeing me for the first time, dredging my life upwards from my splayed, bare feet to my tightly bound hair. Like all the women in my family I have a curved spine that makes it look like I’m always bowing my head, just a little. I try to straighten my shoulders for her examination.

A good Tamil girl like you could have found work in a hundred houses, she observes. When you realised what was happening, why didn’t you try to escape?

How do I explain to an old, sick spinster, whose longest standing relationship was with a junior naval seaman during his weeklong shore leave, what it means to love a child?

My early memories of Chooti Baba are like incense smoke, curling and vanishing. For one thing, Lila Missy and Ronnie Mahaththaya didn’t let me get too close to the child. I wasn’t a proper nanny, but I wasn’t one of the other servants, either. I lived somewhere in the middle, half inside the big house and half in the backroom quarters; in each place, people kept their distance from me because of my buckets.

Every day I hauled the buckets of soiled nappies to an outdoor tap set in a square of cement under a clove tree. Squatting on the ground, I washed the cloths by hand, carefully coaxing slime off pastel-coloured bears and bunnies.

It was from this corner of the world that I watched a parade of visitors come to pay homage to Chooti Baba. I knew they were important persons because none of them did anything – they did not drive their own cars, or open their own umbrellas. Some of the women reminded me of actresses I’d seen on TV. Once, a man cruised up in an armoured jeep with lion flags fluttering from the windows. He might have been the prime minister; such was the company my employers kept.

No point, Rita grumbles through toothless gums. It is dawn. The wiry rambutan tree outside our window is still a spectre in the darkness, and she hasn’t yet put in her dentures.

Posh, powerful, political, but scared of their own … to smell their own … to clean their own …

She has a hundred different uncouth expressions for it, but I can’t bring myself