A Place
by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
we fell in love with and made our home, a place where crabs crawled up to the porch as we sat in bamboo chairs, sipping our morning chai, inhaling the fragrance of frangipani, listening to the bulbul song we had come to expect, the first rays shining into our eyes, the clouds swarming in unannounced, the rush to draw plastic covers around the verandah where yesterday’s laundry was still drying, the palm fronds whispering some secrets long after the rain, the gray-green mold that covered our leather shoes and anything else left unattended for a while, the centipedes nesting by the sink in the kitchen, the geckos peeking in from net-lined windows, the sweetest bananas with a rare orange pulp hanging in bunches on the tree in the back, the creamiest coconuts we gathered and ground into chutneys, the sprigs of aromatic curry leaves from the neighbor’s tree that replaced cilantro in our soups, a place we thought knew everything about, the reef fragments we observed on our evening walks, the white sands, the crystal clear water, the sound of waves that lulled us to sleep, the hooting of an owl that sometimes woke us up, and yet we could not see the angst buried under the surface, the roar that emerged from the bosom of Earth early that morning, the tremors and gasps, the cracks and crevices, the screams and howls, the panic and prayer, then a wave rising taller than the palm trees, washing, erasing all we knew.
Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. Born to a middle-class family in India, she later migrated to the USA. Now, she lives in Ohio with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in numerous online publications and in print anthologies. She has been highly commended in National Flash Microfiction Competition, shortlisted in SmokeLong Quarterly Micro Contest, shortlisted in Bath Flash Fiction Festival. She is currently an editor at Janus Literary and a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut flash fiction collection “Morsels of Purple” is available for purchase on Amazon.com. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com. Reach her @PunyFingers
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “A Place”? I was thinking of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami when I wrote this story. My sister and her family used to live on the beautiful paradise-like island of Car Nicobar when the tsunami struck and obliterated homes, hopes, families. This story is a fictionalized version of the events of and preceding that fateful day as narrated by my sister. This piece was written in one sitting and completed in two drafts. The first version was four sentences long. I sent it to my friend and writer Sudha Balagopal to read and she suggested I make it a one-sentence story. I’m glad I took her advice; it always works for me.
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Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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