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Fiction: A college lecturer is caught in the machinery of state repression during the Emergency
An excerpt from ‘Diary of an Unseen Witness’, by Ampassayya Naveen, translated from the Telugu by Kalpana Kannabiran.
It is night, around 2 am I just can’t sleep. I could hear the sound of a drizzle outside, but it was sultry inside the house. I tossed about in bed. Suseela, and my younger boy, Sudheer were fast asleep. The other two children were peacefully asleep in another cot.
I wondered a couple of times whether I should wake Suseela up. She seemed to be in a deep sleep. Why wake her? I lit a cigarette and lay back thinking.
On 25th June last year, the country was enveloped in the darkness of an eclipse. Anticipation of something to come… tension…disquiet…fear…disturbance.
