I am now narrating Telling VI.

Scroll down and click on Telling VI to open the PDF.

After each Telling, visit Questions & Answers above to read earlier discussions. 

Ask your own questions about Telling VI before Nov. 6 

Next: Telling VII on Nov. 6.

• “I have read many family origin narratives, but rarely one that places the reader at its center.”

• "You skillfully interweave history with an allegory, culminating in a compelling affirmation of the reader’s self-hood—all within an epic poetic framework.”

• "The language may be spare—simple words, short lines—yet it strikes with immense force." 

• "It’s a family story with the pacing of a mystery thriller. Your throat tightens as you read—the emotion lands more powerfully because the author holds so much back."

• “That poem about our forefathers did something rare—it brought me close to people so far removed in time. And then, without warning, it shifted the perspective. That caught me off-guard. It still lingers in my mind.”

• “It is precisely its minimalism, echoing with the voices of that era’s poets, that gives the Partition story its unusual power. I found myself choking up more than once.”

• “Living in Lahore, I have always known of him—now strangely absent from memory on this side of the border. Your story restores him, but it is that last, quiet line about the handkerchief that lingers. I did not expect that to move me as much as it did.”

• "Thank you for reminding me, at every turning point—at each historic crossroads, each larger-than-life moment—that this was still our story, my story. And for the warm, steadying words when the light thinned." 

• “Even as a Muslim Arora, I was so deeply affected by your account of his funeral—the austerity of it, and then those words from his son—an idea so central to your saga, one captured so powerfully in your final words and images. I found myself pausing, with a lump in my throat, before I could read on.”

• "How can a story so serious and sad also be so funny, even in its most tragic moments?"

• "You had just finished describing one of the worst days in our history, and this is all you said: talk about a bad day at the office. I found myself crying and laughing at once—exactly as you intended."

• "The final seven Tellings—spare, lyrical, unflinching—spiral into the central mystery: not of history, but of the Self. They culminate in a revelation at once startling, almost sacrilegious, and yet strangely inevitable." 

• “As one driven from his homeland a thousand years after you were, I was deeply moved by the tetralogy—so much tumult, and then an ending so understated it becomes overwhelming. "No miracle came” —that line unsettled me. It brought tears to my eyes.”

• "The saga plays like an inverted Hitchcock thriller: you told us the ending, reinforced it with clues scattered throughout, yet when that moment finally came—terse, stark, dramatic—it took my breath away. I found myself turning it over in my head long after I’d closed the book."

• “In the span of 21 stories, the saga achieves something amazing: it elevates a half-remembered name to a man shaped by a profound sense of duty, to a life fully lived—and, in the end, to something so subtle, hard to name, and more remarkable still.”