Seated before the glow of her computer screen, author and journalist Sucheta Dasgupta begins not with words, plots, or sequence, but with an imaginary setting in her head. In that setting, a character steps in, makes a decision, and that becomes the trope around which the story revolves.
This has been her writing ritual for more than two decades. Since 2004, Sucheta has been writing stories and saving them in her story bank. Between 2004 and 2007, she produced 14 stories, one in 2016, 2017, 2021, and 2025, each year. On Saturday, the author released 18 such short stories in a collection titled Ladies’ Night: Stories at the Tagore Film Centre.
Explaining the title, the author says, “There are ladies’ nights in bars, where ladies get free drinks — that is what is happening in the stories. The title is incidental to the framing device that holds the stories together.”
That framework accommodates a wide range of classifications, including a fairy tale, a couple of fables, some realistic fiction, love stories, a feminist parable, magic realism, speculative fiction, horror, and surreal stories. The collection ends with what she calls a “true story”. “I prefer calling it a true story, rather than autofiction, but the genre is autofiction,” she notes.
The collection that traverses genres and moods, is reflective of her worldview and principles. Speaking about feminism through her personal lens, Sucheta states, “The second wave of feminism is the kernel of feminism. I’m also talking about [in the book] how women have to take their freedom. They don’t have to wait for men to give them the freedom. I’m focusing on women improving themselves.”
At its core, the book, according to this author, guides the readers on “how to think, which is very important because that is how you can lead your life in a way that makes sense and which creates beauty in the world,” she adds.
For Running Head Books, it was this distinct voice that drew them to Sucheta. Because of “her unique voice, first and foremost, and the extraordinary stories, and the quirky structure; all of it. As the blurb says, she makes the bizarre accessible and the forbidden human,” say Chitra Viraraghavan and Krishna Shastri Devulapalli, founders of this homegrown publishing house.
Chitra and Krishna started this firm with a clear intent to find, nurture, and publish original voices. This is their attempt to take better control of and be more attentive with their own intellectual property. Their vision aligns closely with a larger global shift. “World over today, the most exciting literature is coming out of small, indie publishers,” they say, adding that the Booker Prize, as well as the Nobel Prize, in recent times has gone to writers nurtured and published by such book companies. “We are hopeful that this will become a trend here, too. Thus, every indie publisher here is no rival but an ally.”
Currently, the duo is focusing mostly on publishing fiction and narrative non-fiction of all types, both in English and in translation. And in that process, they are completely hands-on. “We intend to take time over every book we publish, and that has been true of Ladies’ Night as well. Our tagline itself is: one book at a time. Because writers and books deserve that kind of undivided attention. It’s only then that we are being fair to the person for whom it is all intended: the reader,” say the founders.