Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2022

Ten Mutually-Contradictory Counterfactuals

Poem

Akhil Katyal | 11 Aug, 2022

(Illustration: Saurabh Singh)

1. In 1959, the country’s capital moves to Bangalore.
2. Mountbatten dies of dysentery in his second week in Delhi.
3. Ambedkar lives for another thirty years.
4. Thomas Roe gets nothing from Jahangir.
5. Zia’s plane crashes in ’77 instead of ’88.
6. The RSS ban is never lifted.
7. Manto stays put in Bombay.
8. They stop Indira from declaring the Emergency.
9. Godse misses all his three shots.
10. The crowd gathering around Babri is dispersed.

BR Ambedkar Freedom Issue 2022 Lord Louis Mountbatten politics society Zia-ul-Haq

About The Author

Akhil Katyal

Akhil Katyal is the author of Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems and co-editor of The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia