What Can You Eat, Smriti?

Short story published in 'The Bombay Literary Magazine'. Issue 56 | Fiction | December 2023

EDITOR'S NOTE

There is something about ‘body horror’ – the genre that take simple, basic biological processes to the extreme. Perhaps, they remind us of our body’s fragility, limitations and ultimately, mortality. In Rahul Jain’s ‘What Can you Eat Smriti’, the story responds to its title with a resounding ‘everything’! As a Jain woman, the protagonist’s relationship with food is already complicated and add to that the ability to to eat anything, and the desire to see how far one can go. It reminded me of ‘Head’, the first story in South Korean writer Bora Chung’s ‘Cursed Bunny’. Both stories deal with the idea of shame and how hiding the undesirable part of oneself from others has a way of coming back. Oh Freud, you and your Return of the Repressed.

— Amulya B
The Bombay Literary Magazine

Read the story here

Image credits:

Salvador Dalí. Les Diners de Gala. Translated by John Peter Moore. Publisher, Felicie, 1973.. Dali, of course, was insane. But his insanity, to borrow Dr. Evil’s description of his parent, Evil pere, “was the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.” Dali’s Les Diners de Gala purports to be a culinary book with 136 recipes organised into 12 chapters. Naturally, Dali supplied his own illustrations, thus saving us the trouble of manufacturing our nightmares. It is a curious paradox that though the world is made for those with normal appetites, it is made by those with abnormal ones. Doubtless, Smriti, the protagonist of Rahul Jain’s story, would have been able to eat her way through every course, every meal, and every last lip-smacking, biology-defying, decency-deflowering, transgressive calorie.

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