In 2025 I was shortlisted for the Emerging Writers’ Award at the Brighton Book Festival (2025) for Bodies in Transit, a piece of experimental, diasphoric fiction. Below I share the first part of the piece which is in five sections
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Bodies in Transit
To be born is to inherit someone else’s unfinished crossing.
I. Ribcage at 35,000 Feet
The plane thrums; a stolen ribcage, hollowed out and repurposed. Asha/Anna’s knees jam the thin vinyl seat, vibrating in sync with the relentless click-click-sss of the man beside her, gutting a customs form with accustomed precision.
Occupation: Tourist.
Veḷḷakkāraṉ/White man.
Outside, clouds metastasise; bruise-purple continents adrift on a petri dish sky. Below, the invisible suture lines of empires. No one waits for her arrival. None remain. A dossier, cold and heavy in her lap: colonial ledgers masquerading as bullet points, the ink like dried henna, a faded promise of connection. Ammu/Gran’s voice, a phantom tape loop etched onto her bones, hisses: ‘Nothing is ‘just’ anything. Ever. Peel the word. Find the rot beneath.’
The ‘just’ hangs now, a shiv in the recycled air, pricking at her lungs. She looks away, into the porthole, and catches only the reflection of her own carefully presented face.
II. Limestone and Leather
The guesthouse exhales its history: decades of dust, damp plaster, and the seep of exhaustion into its limestone bones. Forgotten spices, mildew, the ghosts of monsoons long past. The altar holds fresh jasmine, deities heavy with garlands, a lit camphor flame. The scent burrows. Memory rises: she is a child again at the feet of her Ammu/Gran.
The caretaker emerges, eyes sharp, performing a swift inventory: the too-polished brogues; the too-tight clamp of the jaw; the uneasy gap in between.
“Just visiting, beti?” The question is soft. Almost kind.
But ‘just’ detonates silently in the humid air.
Tourist. The costume chafes immediately. Her mother’s cautions surface like bubbles in tar: ‘Don’t stare. Don’t touch. Be respectful.’ They melt in the copper-tinged heat, thick as clotting yogurt in her throat.
III. Jallianwala Bagh: High Noon Spectacle 2013
The crowd breathes as one vast organism. Sticky. History settles, dense and unmoving.
A boy’s kulfi melts, ivory tears soaking into soil where the shadows are fossilised screams trapped mid-escape. The air vibrates with a low, pulsing hum.
Flags snap with military crispness above the narrow entrance, a fractured semaphore: Union Jacks sutured violently to Tirangas. Cardboard signage lies abandoned on the ground, ‘Special price for memory!’
The Prime Minister’s Oxfords sink into sacred dirt. He pauses. Barefoot now. A wreath of marigolds – strangled suns on a silk ribbon. He speaks of terrible histories, his voice clean of blood.
Cameras purr. Obscene.
The apology never comes. It hangs, a phantom limb.
Asha/Anna’s spine arches, live wire, memory surges. Ammu/Gran’s calloused hand guiding hers through stolen mango groves, the scent of ripe fruit and damp earth, her voice a murmur.
This earth remembers boots. Red. White. Blue.
The soil thrums, low and sullen, under her bare soles.
The passport burns a hole in her bag.
I am completing other stories to include in a publication which includes the full short story. It took me over three months to write this piece and I am still working on it. I found it difficult to find a way to express belonging, heritage and history and the conflict it evokes in me as someone living between multiple cultures and histories.
Wishing you well in your writing,
Olivia & Bailey (as always, could not have completed this piece without her input!)
O. S. King 