In Yogendra Ahuja’s novella Laffaz, the storyteller emerges not as a guardian of memory or a conjurer of collective meaning, but as a figure of deception, destabilisation and moral vacuity. Originally written in Hindi and now translated into English by Varsha Tiwary, Laffaz marks a powerful intervention in the long literary tradition that venerates the storyteller. Unlike Scheherazade, who delays death with stories of wonder and wisdom, or Chaucer’s pilgrims who share tales to break the monotony of a long journey, Ahuja’s Laffaz is a manipulative shapeshifter – a conjurer of fictions designed to defraud, incite and destroy. Tiwary’s translation deftly captures this elusiveness, preserving both the stylistic subtlety and thematic sharpness of the original, while opening the text to a wider readership without compromising its linguistic or cultural density.

Ahuja’s Laffaz – literally ‘word-spinner’ or ‘glib-talker’ – is a figure who traverses the porous boundaries of identity, region and ideology. He weaponises narrative with chilling efficiency, using language not to construct meaning but to unravel it. Whether posing as a religious seer fomenting communal hatred or as a dedicated social-worker drawing a trusting bank manager into perpetrating white-collar crime, Laffaz is a master of linguistic performance who manipulates registers, idioms and emotional cues with surgical precision. The result is a character who is neither villain nor victim, but something far more unsettling: a cipher whose stories do not reflect the world but remake it in fractured, violent and opportunistic ways.

The narrative is marked by a formal austerity that mirrors its thematic concerns. Ahuja’s prose resists ornament, leaning instead into a flat, affectless style that becomes most potent when describing the unfolding of social rupture and personal ruin. In this, the novella echoes the modernist fascination with the bureaucratic and the impersonal, and the postmodern preoccupation with the simulacrum – the world not as it is, but as it is performed through language. As Jean Baudrillard theorised, we now live in a world of simulations, and Ahuja’s Laffaz is an agent of that world – manufacturing realities that blur the line between performance and truth, illusion and intention.

Perhaps the most compelling literary parallel can be drawn with Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘carnavalesque’. Laffaz operates in a world where the boundaries between high and low discourse collapse, where sacred texts and bureaucratic jargon are equally available for parody and appropriation. Yet unlike Bakhtin’s carnivals, which promise renewal through inversion, Ahuja’s carnival is one of entropy – a descent into moral and epistemic chaos.

In translating this complex textual and philosophical architecture, Tiwary demonstrates both linguistic skill and interpretive insight. Her English rendering retains the shape-shifting energy of the original, especially in her handling of the central character’s protean voice. Through careful modulation of tone, Tiwary creates narrative texture: during the scenes describing the incitement of communal violence, her prose becomes distanced, clinical, mirroring the character’s emotional detachment and the mechanised spread of chaos. In sharp contrast, when portraying the emotional wreckage left in Laffaz’s wake – a bank manager forced into quiet exile in Medinipur, a wife hollowed out by betrayal – Tiwary moves us into a register of painful intimacy. The reader is held suffocatingly close, forced to witness the consequences of deception not as abstract fallout, but as visceral, lived trauma.

Yet Tiwary does not pretend that translation is a seamless act. In her translator’s notes, she acknowledges the impossibility of perfect equivalence. Her decision to retain the original title – Laffaz – is a gesture both clever and honest: a tacit recognition that some words, and some characters, resist full capture in another language. The untranslatability of the term becomes emblematic of the ungraspable nature of the protagonist himself, whose essence lies precisely in his slipperiness, his refusal to be pinned down by language or loyalty.

Thematically, the novella resonates with postcolonial anxieties about identity, language and nationhood, while also engaging broader questions about the ethics of storytelling. Through Laffaz, Ahuja dismantles the romantic ideal of the narrator as a moral agent. Instead, he posits a more unsettling truth: that stories, in the wrong hands, can become instruments of ideology, violence and erasure. The novella thus joins a lineage of works – from Rushdie’s Shame to Coetzee’s Disgrace – that explore the danger of unchecked narrative power. Even Kafka’s bureaucratic absurdities are present in Ahuja’s world, where language no longer functions as a medium of truth or reconciliation, but as a tool of control and erasure. Derrida’s notion of différance – that meaning is always deferred, never fully present – finds apt illustration in the last scene of the novella, where the always speaking, always performing protagonist, stops short of revealing any closure; ‘just a laffaz, nothing else’, he answers to the narrator’s final attempt to know his ‘true’ identity.

Laffaz is a novella of unsettling brilliance, one that strips the storyteller of his mythic garb and reveals him as a potential agent of harm. Ahuja’s narrative is both timely and timeless, speaking to a world where truth is fragile, and language can be both wonder and wreckage. Tiwary’s translation not only honours the spirit of the original, but expands its reach, offering Anglophone readers a glimpse into the dark mirror of storytelling. Together, Ahuja and Tiwary remind us that in a world saturated with narratives, the question is not merely what is being said, but who is saying it – and why.

Dr Sudeshna Chakravorty is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, Sushil Kar College (affiliated to Calcutta University).

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