Abstract

This story is about the fear of vigilante censorship that writers of war-torn or post-war countries struggle with. In a haze of imagination, fact, and memory, the narrator becomes aware, on a rainy evening, of the absurdity of trying to pin down the meaning of words in translation – a crime, for example, might be a religious edict when the context changes – and the risk he runs of documenting certain things in his world. His father’s advice that silence is better than dogs eating his tongue that has been cut off, is recalled on the evening of his assassination , which could be either real or imagined.