To love what we cannot keep: On Sara Rai’s ‘Other Skies, Other Stories’

Other Skies, Other Stories is a collection of Sara Rai’s fiction. Its stories explore how people notice, remember, name, and lose the world around them. Rai treats language as both atmosphere and home. It shapes what her characters can see, while also becoming the place where they must live.

The collection includes the titular story, “Other Skies,” and stories such as “Catching Butterflies.” A man writes a family genealogy but records mostly the dead. Another mistakes butterflies for autumn leaves. Rai also writes between Hindi, Urdu, and English, and translated some stories herself with Ira Pande.

The book matters because Rai does not promise that language can possess reality. Instead, she presents reaching as a way of dwelling. Her stories remain tied to Allahabad, including the Ganga, a nallah, tamarind streets, and ruined colonial bungalows. The place holds firm, while lives and words keep passing.

Rai wrote the stories in Other Skies, Other Stories across nearly three decades. That long span matters because the collection is not built around one moment or a single invented world. It gathers changing acts of attention while returning to the same physical and emotional ground.

That ground is Allahabad, the city Rai has lived in nearly all her life. The article names the Ganga, the nallah behind her house, tamarind streets, and colonial bungalows slumping toward ruin. These locations give the stories a recognizable material world. They are stable places where uncertain lives unfold.

The contrast is central to Rai’s method. The city and its locales hold firm, but the people and languages inside them do not. Names shift. Memories vanish. Moments pass. By returning to Allahabad, Rai shows that a place can remain while identity, perception, and language keep changing around it.

Rai’s characters cannot securely possess what they love or remember. Their efforts to hold on become records of disappearance. A man begins writing his family’s genealogy but produces a longer account of the dead. The narrator of “Catching Butterflies” writes just as a butterfly leaves his shoulder.

In “Other Skies,” Badri carves the narrator’s name into a block of ice. He knows the name will disappear by evening when the ice melts. These details show the key mechanism: writing, naming, and memory preserve something only briefly. The act of holding also reveals that loss is already underway.

Rai does not treat this failure as simple defeat. The article says the reaching is itself a form of dwelling. Her characters make a life in the throw, even when the net cannot keep what it catches. Their attention gives passing lives a moment of recognition without pretending they can be permanently possessed.

Hindi, Urdu, English, and translation matter because Rai’s characters live within more than one linguistic world. Rai writes in a comfortable mixture of Hindi and Urdu, yet sometimes finds herself composing in English. Words from one language percolate into another, showing that no single tongue can render the world whole.

Some stories were carried into English by Rai herself, while others were translated with Ira Pande. Pande brings an ear sensitive to shifts of register. The article presents English as a net thrown across a gap. Translation does not erase the distance between languages; it makes the act of reaching visible.

This matters for how readers understand the collection. Rai does not hide or mourn untranslatability. People reach toward one another because they cannot be fully transparent to one another. The result is not perfect arrival but shared attention. Language becomes home precisely because it remains incomplete and requires continued effort.

The gardener’s name reveals that identity is not always a fixed possession. As a boy, Ghulam Rasool was so devoted to cinema that he gave away his birth name and became Dilip Kumar. His chosen name came from a film star, but that star also used a name different from Muhammad Yusuf Khan, his birth name.

The mechanism is a chain of borrowed identities. A Muslim caretaker of Mughal graves wears a Hindu name associated with a famous actor. The name becomes a shelter someone else built. Rai does not present this simply as disguise. The gardener inhabits the borrowed self tenderly, while pouring his inner life into the ruined garden and buried princes.

The story therefore complicates easy divisions between identity and religion. Dilip Kumar’s name crosses those boundaries without becoming fully stable. His partly borrowed self gives him room to live and imagine. The article says his name is partly on loan, and that loan helps free him rather than merely limit him.

Rai shifts from the gardener’s vision to two schoolboys because private grace should not become public proof. The gardener sees the ghost of a Mughal queen, who tells him that this earth, rather than a promised world beyond it, is all there is. He receives this not as terror but as grace.

Then Rai widens the frame. The schoolboys see him bowing before an empty mausoleum and decide he has “a screw loose.” This does not simply puncture the mystical scene. It creates a second view of the same person: visionary to himself, eccentric to others. The mechanism is a change in scale and perspective.

That refusal matters because the gardener keeps his right to remain partly unread. Rai grants him an experience no one else can confirm, then returns him to ordinary local life. The wider frame protects rather than mocks him. His grace remains private, and his ordinariness remains intact.

Treating an ant, butterfly, ghost, moon, and human life with equal care means giving each one sustained attention rather than deciding in advance what matters. The article presents Rai’s fiction as a practice of looking. Her characters notice what ordinary living usually leaves aside, including fragile moments, strange names, and private visions.

The butterfly in “Catching Butterflies” offers a clear example. The narrator writes at the moment it flies from his shoulder. Badri’s ice carving works similarly: a name matters even when the ice will melt. The gardener’s vision also receives careful attention, but Rai then widens the frame so it does not become a spectacle.

The article does not specifically explain an ant or a moon, so those examples cannot be developed from its evidence. Its broader implication is clear: attention need not depend on permanence or public importance. Rai’s writing honors what passes by letting it remain partly itself, rather than forcing it into a final meaning.