Diwali in Muzaffarnagar: Stories

Friendship between two teenaged boys dissolves in the aftermath of an act of violence typical of the place they live in – the north Indian town of Muzaffarnagar. A young man comes to the same town to celebrate Diwali with his family and learns that, given his roots, his cosmopolitanism might not be an option anymore. A young woman, hitherto unburdened with family duties, grapples with the absence of grief upon her father’s death. Elsewhere, a recently married couple is pulled apart by a crisis rooted in the woman’s traumatic childhood. In Tanuj Solanki’s Diwali in Muzaffarnagar, young men and women travel between the past and the present, the metropolis and the small town, and the always-at-odds needs of life: solitude and family.