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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.

Yogendra Ahuja, translated by Varsha Tiwary
Laffaz
The Antonym Collections, 2025

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........

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