The Chakravyuha, a labyrinth of great defense. My Chakravyuha is not one of people or of walls, but of language, created out of the 12 ones that I have happened to learn (English, Kannada, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, Hindi, Turkish, Bahasa Indonesian, Egyptian Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese). I decided to write six stories, framed with two stories told in two different languages. Parts of the story happens in one language, and blurs into another. A Canadian immigrant returns to Japan for her grandmother’s birthday, while an immigrant from Russia does the same. A French person of Egyptian origin is robbed on the streets of Cairo, while an Egyptian person who resides in France wonders why such calamaties happen to him. The stories that are being told intermittently are the same, but the culture, language, and context changes. I did this because I wanted to explore how stories change due to language and cultural context, but humanity remains fundamentally the same. To allow two fundamentally different humans to connect through the maze of language and into the nested dense of simultaneity, this is the project of Chakravyuha.
You can find a digital copy of Chakravyuha on Smashwords for now: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/993351