The Coast: Twelve parallel short stories

The Coast begins with an absurd short story that gives way to a sequence of images taken along the Indian coastline. While the photographs were taken in real situations, the continuous removal and addition of context manipulates the line between what is real and what is not, in a way similar to how new realities are increasingly constructed today. Some might imagine the book as a fable, while others might recognize reality in it. In any case, the book, through its stories, alludes to the undercurrents of a country experiencing a greater frequency of violence—religious, caste-based, sexual, or of any other kind—and to its growing normalization, which is far more absurd than the story itself. There is a respite toward the end, when the book moves to the sea. The boundary between land and water becomes a point of liberation beyond which the characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt, but also ecstasy. The short story at the beginning of the book also exists in eleven other versions, each with minimal changes, like a game of telephone. As with the images, each story takes on a slightly different meaning with each subsequent reading and becomes one of a dozen distinct truths.