Aversion

This story is a fusion of satire, magical realism, humour, and horror.

This is contemporary Sri Lanka, seen through a specific lens, somewhere in a place located in Samsara, not forty leagues from Paradise as the Tourist Board would have us believe, but much nearer the Other Place. Those grizzled old cartographers made an error when they were detailing its site. But we live here, so we know it from the inside.

We prefer to live on its surface, and avert our gaze from what troubles us, but its tendency to chaos is also inside us. It shows in the high murder rates, the abuse of children, the degradation of women. In the way conformity is endorsed and anything which challenges the ‘norm’ is vilified, from gender diversity to neurodivergence. They call it Paradise, but it is still a work in progress. As are all of us, who live in it.