Annie Zaidi is a keen observer of her own society, and her writing is guided by a strong sense of social justice. She has written about problems associated with India’s democratic process, its bureaucracy and infrastructure, and it’s cultural and caste prejudices. She is particularly interested in the unique hurdles faced by women. She caught attention when she won the Nine Dots Award in May 2019 for addressing the contemporary issue of the world. She herself admits : What really appealed to me about the Nine Dots Prize was the way it encouraged entrants to think without borders or restraints. … The Prize will allow me to dedicate time to the examination of this question, which is of critical importance in the modern world. (The Nine Dots Prize, 2019) Annie Zaidi’s set of stories in Love Story # 1 to 14 is a set of interior monologues or we would call them dramatic monologues from the Robert Browning viewpoint; a person looking at life and sometimes stumbling on an attraction without being aware of it in different ways. A lonely woman, for example, falls in love with the voice of an announcer at a railway station and undertakes a train journey just to hear the voice. That is actually the opening story and is used to signal to the reader that Zaidi’s romances do not start with a ‘once upon a time’ in the accepted fashion. In this work of Annie Zaidi, people are more in love with love than with the lover. In the 14 stories, Zaidi explores every aspect of this ‘not so brief’ madness through situations that could belong to any part of the country. All the stories are characterized by a deep sense of compassion, though their titles – hashtags, aka and all – offset the compassion with a modern quirkiness. The collection gives credit to a writer who wants to be taken seriously. Annie Zaidi takes us on a voyage through the nature of love in modern, urban India. Occasionally one wonders how the protagonists are so omniscient that they can understand the thoughts going through people’s psyche and not necessarily the ‘two hearts beating as one kind of understanding'. Annie Zaidi’s Love stories # 1 to 14 are at once warm and distant, violent and gentle - and, above all, untroubled by cynicism. This is a look at love, straight in the eye, to understand the alluring nature of the beast.
Research Scholar, Dept. of English, L.N. Mithila University, Darbhanga
