It feels like a lifetime ago, a different era with different people when we sat around a table in Kunde café at Nazarbayev University discussing the formation of a new journal, this journal, rooted not only in the geography of Central Asia but in the language, a journal which would be published in the three languages locally spoken (English, Russian and Kazakh) celebrating the art of the written word—poetry, non-fiction, fiction, and visual art, photography, and painting. A journal rooted in emerging identities, however fractured, composed, curated, pieced together.

Around that table in Kunde, writers, scholars, and artists gathered from the university and area to create something new and unique. What we envisioned was a journal in print and online, and we were ambitious, excited, but looking back now it all seems so far away. We were other people then, now changed. The eight or ten of us who could walk to that table in that café back then are today separated by five continents, and seemingly so much more. No one can look back and forward again in the same way. Yet even now, in the midst of the pandemic, many of us are still learning who we are, challenged by who we were supposed to be, and what we were supposed to be doing.

This journal which started out with the idea of complete issues, has not been complete but composite. Pieces, with no clear uniformity… like this world, like conversations. We have put out poetry, art, prose, and now, after a long delay, fiction.

And so, it is with great honor to present and publish this story by Shilpi Suneja. “Outside the Body” our first fiction submission, in many ways, gives us a key, a keyhole, a door, a crack through which we may peer and push a little.

This story, along with the accompanying interview turns our attention toward the subtle balance between both community and alienation. Here is a story of living in two worlds at once with not only Suneja’s experiences in her own life growing up in two countries but also the characters in her story are those who are living within their own community and at the margins of society, taunting our expectations of not only a societal but physical gender binary. Who can forget Steffi standing in traffic? Her sari held up with one hand flagrantly exposing “her truth,” and covering her mouth from the exhausts of the passing cars with the other.

The world of “Outside the Body” stays with you, calls you to explore further. I spent so much time between my first and second reading, pausing, rereading, researching, both the lives of the Hijra, and their kholi. There is space within the powerful scenes herein which linger and still sting and plague long after the last line. Even the title carries so much weight and depth. “Outside the Body”—Which body? Physical? Or is it Social? Societal? Outside the body politic? Outside how? But we are never fully outside, are we? We can never fully escape. We still carry so much with us, no matter how much we shed.

Within the story scenes exist, like the characters, both foreign and familiar. The point of view shifts, altering and disrupting our comfort, spending sometimes only a moment with one character before we shift again to the next, like Ché’s camera framing each item in a room. Vespa, Steffi, Champa, Saffron and Izzat and Ché— a mosaic of sorts. A staccato. We are never fully at rest, as we are left in a kind of languished emotional resonance. The story and scenes are cinematic and after time moments in “Outside the Body” became melded together with my own memories of driving through Paris traffic witnessing refugees sleeping, sitting, on the street, in tents, on the side of the freeway, approaching cars forced to slow down or stopped in traffic.

You don’t want to look, although you shouldn’t look away.

There are layers and depth in what Suneja is doing, allowing us to open up into our own, to be held up by our arm as we try and find our way back just as Vespa goes out into the rain to meet Steffi to bring her back. That is, if we are willing to listen and to look, to watch, even if it tests our expectations and upsets our preconceptions. We should hope in this life to be confronted, challenged, upset, and uncomfortable more—to seek out truth, however upsetting. Stare at it even. In these uneasy moments we may find the space in which we can grow.

It has now been over nine months since we were all in that café. We are not the same, but we are not worse off, I do not think.

Although, I have to say, we are not better off either.

And we are therefore, in some small way, like the characters in Suneja’s story, existing in a kind of space that is predominately undefined and undefinable, seeking normalcy and community out of our own alienation.