City of Incident tells the story of six women and six men, each of them struggling to keep their balance in a metropolis that affords them little power, little hope, and little chance of redemption. Their stories twine together to give us an unsettling look into the lives that take place on the peripheries of our vision.
These are people you may encounter on the Metro, glimpse from the window of your car, or read about in brief items on the inside pages of the newspaper. They might be among those who watch as you hurry past, from silent balconies, under flyovers, and behind the glass partition at the bank: people who don’t particularly interest you until a fragile moment shatters.
The lives of the characters in City of Incident coalesce into a great darkened lens that presents an unnerving view of a great city and its most powerless inhabitants.
Annie Zaidi is the author of Gulab, Love Stories # 1–14, and Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales which was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Prize (non-fiction). She is the editor of Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing. She won The Hindu Playwright Award in 2018 for her play Untitled 1 and the Nine Dots prize in 2019 for her essay ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus’. Her novel Prelude to a Riot won the TATA Literature Live! Book of the Year Award—Fiction in 2020.
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