Namaste Trump and Other Stories

by Tabish Khair

A collection of other stories from shining India—those not often told.

The short story “Namaste Trump” starts in a deceptive domestic setting, where a servant from the hinterlands is patronized and exploited by an upwardly mobile urban family. But as the nation celebrates Trump’s visit and copes with the pandemic, it ends up becoming a prophecy of endless haunting. This sets the agenda for a series of stories that delve into fracturing or broken lives in small-town India over the past fifty years.

In the novella-length “Night of Happiness,” pragmatic entrepreneur Anil Mehrotra has set up his thriving business empire with the help of his lieutenant, Ahmed, an older man who is different in more ways than one. Quiet and undemanding, Ahmed talks in aphorisms; bothers no one; and always gets the job done. But when one stormy night, Mehrotra discovers an aspect to Ahmed that defies all reason, he is forced to find out more about his trusted aide. What will he madness or something worse?

In a series of three linked stories, “The Corridor,” “The Ubiquity of Riots” and “Elopement,” Khair traces, through the eyes of an adolescent, the tensions of living as a liberal Muslim in India in the 1970s and 1980s, tensions that isolate families, break friendships, and point to the violence to come. The narrator of these stories, now a busy professional, returns in the third person in another story, “Olden Friends are Golden,” about belonging and exclusion on WhatsApp. Then there is “Scam,” a flippantly narrated story about a crime that
can only be comprehended as a scam perpetuated by the victim, and in “Shadow of a Story” violence returns to a village family in an unimaginable shape.

“The Thing with Feathers” is perhaps about hope, but it is hope beyond despair, hope perhaps gone or, is all hope mad now? Finally, “The Last Installment” narrates two farmers, a father and a son, in a village of North India, caught in a corporate the breathless sentences of the story making the reader sense the desperation of the central character as he finally fights to breathe, to live.

By turns poetic, chilling, and heartbreaking, ranging from understated realism to gothic terror, this is a book of stories about precarious lives in a world without tolerance.

Praise for Tabish Khair

“Ingenious and mischievous …”
– The New Yorker

“Khair writes brilliantly ... Unmissable …”
– The Times

“Irreverent, intelligent, and explosive.”
– The Independent

“For a book so concise and witty, it is also surprisingly textured …”
– The New Republic

“The picture that emerges may sear your soul much like your all-time favorite film.”
– India Today

“Intelligent and argumentative …”
– London Review of Books

Genres: Short Stories

278 pages, Paperback

Published July 25, 2023

About the author

Tabish Khair was born and educated in Bihar, India. He worked in Delhi as a Staff Reporter until his late twenties and is now a professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, his novels have been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (Hong Kong), the Hindu Best Fiction Prize and the Crossword Vodafone Literature Awards (India), the Encore Award (UK) and for translation prizes in Denmark and France.

Reviews

[Annie Zaidi]

My review of Tabish Khair's latest collection, Namaste Trump and Other Stories:

The titular story, “Namaste Trump” reveals the banal cruelty of a cynical upper-class executive who turns out a domestic worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, an act that has spiritual consequences. “Shadow of a Story” is a proper ghost story where Khair is in his element as a writer of fiction working in academia. Its narrator is a man who takes literature seriously and is able to reconsider positions taken in the context of literary criticism, and reassess his own valourisation of a particular postcolonial aesthetic after an encounter with brute violence in Phansa. Truth appears as a frightening presence in “The Thing with Feathers.” A personal favourite, this is a story about the unravelling of a teacher, Rakesh Sir, who “did things properly, always within limits” but who loses control of his tongue, and thus inadvertently becomes dangerous. The author once again drives us to a junction of reason where the evidence provided by one’s physical senses and simple common sense collides with an intangible, unbelievable world where the rules of our world no longer hold good.

Through these Phansa-connected stories and their chaotic or uncanny outcomes, Khair reveals to us a landscape where petty cruelty is interlaced with looming threats of violence or destitution, and also with a quiet courage that approaches madness. It is a landscape filled with memorable characters that the reader can carry into, or far beyond, the towns and villages of their own origin.

Read the full review in Frontline magazine: https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/...

[Cristina Gámez-Fernández · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just loved reading Namaste Trump and Other Stories, a collection of ten short stories authored by Indian writer Tabish Khair. Namaste Trump excels at its exploration of how our times forge human (and nonhuman) lives taking their very existence to unprecedented limits. The irony lies in how these situations resonate with historical instances of injustice, in a never-ending loop which left me baffled and open mouthed at our very ontology as a race, torn between despair and hope. This volume is a must read if you love finely nuanced Literature (uppercase L).

[Melissa Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Khair writes quietness like a language. Not empty silence, but silence full of things people are afraid to say. Between lines, between breaths, between flashbacks. In Olden Friends are Golden, I could feel nostalgia thick like humidity. Two friends speaking with politeness but hiding decades of pain. You could sense the love, the jealousy, the decay of time. I’m not sure what hurt more, what was said, or what was left unsaid. It reminded me painfully of friendships I let slip away without noticing.

[Jean Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book didn’t just entertain me, it unsettled me in that quiet, creeping way the best literary fiction does. Night of Happiness left a cold space in my chest. That scene with the halwa?
I felt myself freeze. I kept imagining how it must feel to sit in a room where reality fractures silently and no one screams, madness happening politely, calmly, with tea on the table.
It’s eerie, but not supernatural. Emotional delusion scares me more than ghosts ever could. And Khair writes it with such restraint that you feel the unspoken tragedy vibrating underneath.

[Ninni · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the Western world, Muslims are often 'the other'. This collection offers a view of the lives of Muslims in India, who are clearly still 'the other', but in a way that is intriguing both in its similarities and differences from the version we are used to reading about.

For readers with some knowledge of Indian literary traditions, the collection also becomes amusing in the subtle way it plays with expectations of genre and plot.

[Joan Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how this collection respects the reader. It never explains too much, never holds your hand, never tells you what to think. It drops you into rooms, into memories, into unresolved tensions, and trusts that you’ll sit with discomfort instead of demanding clarity.
I kept finding myself rereading lines, not because I didn’t understand them, but because they tasted better the second time. That’s the sign of a writer who trusts his stories and his reader.

[Teresa Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I finished Night of Happiness, I needed a minute. I walked around my living room like someone had unplugged something in me. There’s grief in that story, thick, sticky grief — disguised as routine. When Ahmed “feeds” his guest food that isn’t there, it shattered me. It’s delusion, yes, but also devotion. A ritual clung to because to let it go would be to accept loss. I wanted to hold this fictional man and tell him it’s okay to mourn. Fiction shouldn’t hit this deep — but it does.

[William Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One thing I deeply appreciated is how Khair writes ordinary Indian life without exoticizing it for Western eyes. He shows rainwater pooling in old apartment hallways, the smell of tea leaves boiling too long, the ache of financial struggle, the class discomfort, the constant negotiation between faith and modernity. It felt familiar, not as an outsider watching India, but as someone living inside its rooms.

[Eric willard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how Khair writes dialogue. It feels like overhearing real people talk, not polished, not literary, just human. Sometimes characters speak more in what they do not say than what they do. Silences here are heavy. Pregnant. Loud.
It reminded me that in real life, truth rarely arrives in full sentences.

[Nathan Sinclair · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ubiquity of Riots struck me harder than I expected. It’s engaging how quickly humans become mobs, how memory becomes fuel, how fear becomes identity. The story doesn’t scream politics, it just quietly shows how fragile peace is.
It made me think of real headlines, real people harmed by ideas they never asked for

[roland stringer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Corridor whispered instead of spoke. It’s about choices you can’t undo, about what ifs that sit behind closed doors. The slow dread creeps up on you, like walking down a hallway and realizing halfway you don’t know what’s waiting at the end. I kept thinking, What do we carry with us?
What do we leave behind? It’s a story that lingers like a perfume on clothes long after the person leaves

[Debra Teddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book awakened an old fear in me, the fear of ordinary loneliness. Not dramatic heartbreak, not cinematic tragedy, just the slow, everyday kind that hides inside routines. These characters often sit alone in crowded rooms, thinking thoughts no one hears.
I recognized myself there more than I wanted to admit.

[Ronald Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories are usually something I dip into between novels but here I wanted to pause after each one. I didn’t want to rush. If you love plot driven fiction, this might feel slow. But if you love character driven stories where emotions ripple under the surface like underwater currents this will feed your soul.
It certainly fed mine.

[Sharon pardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not many short story collections maintain emotional coherence, but this one does. Each story speaks to loss, memory, identity, faith, power, just from different angles.
It felt like walking around a sculpture and seeing the same shape cast different shadows.

[Alexander Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s something cinematic in how scenes unfold. Slow pans. Close-ups on tea cups, rainwater, photographs, towels laid neatly for lunch. Mundane details become emotional time bombs. A spoon hitting a plate suddenly feels like thunder.
That attention to mood is masterful.

[Thomas Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t just read Olden Friends are Golden I felt it. Aging friendships hit differently when you’re past your early twenties. Distance grows even when affection stays.
This story felt like a sigh nostalgic, soft, slightly aching.

[Christine Swett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Khair writes women with quiet dignity even when they’re absent, they shape worlds. The wife in Night of Happiness barely appears, but her presence is everywhere. A shadow. A prayer. A loss.
I kept thinking about her long after the story ended.

[corey Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection changed my week. I carried the stories around with me, while scrolling my phone. I kept remembering scenes like flashes: rain beating metal roofs, silence in a kitchen, halwa that wasn’t there.
I love when a book doesn’t end when I close it.

[Sune Borkfelt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Some of Khair's best work.

[Kavya]

DNF