ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes two short stories: Temsula Ao’s English text “The Last Song” and Jehirul Hussain’s Assamese “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali.” These are paired because they are similar with respect to closure. Ciphers of survival are found in the supplemental closures tagged along at the end – a section titled “P.S.” in “The Last Song” and a solitary sentence separated from the diegetic space in Hussain’s story. In “The Last Song,” the lead character, Apenyo’s singing voice, is an index of agency. This vocal element survives in the memory of her village community even after her brutal rape and murder by the Indian army and returns as an ethical injunction to listen to occluded others in the supplemental section. The snail in Hussain’s story floats down a river stuck to the corpse of an anonymous young man who has been brutally murdered during a counter-insurgency operation. After the protagonists of the story, a group of children, fish the corpse out, they fling the snail away and forget about it. But, the imperceptible movement of the thrown-away snail in the last sentence, while the children’s attention is riveted on the corpse, shows how life endures in and perhaps escapes deathworlds.
