‘That’s A Fire Ant Right There!’: An emotional archive of the common, rural Telugu Muslim lives

That’s A Fire Ant Right There!: Tales from Kavali is not a book that tries to impress you. It doesn’t chase shock, drama, or spectacle. Instead, it does something much harder and much more necessary: it makes you pay attention to the ordinary. Through the voice of a young boy growing up in Kavali, a small coastal town in Andhra Pradesh, Mohammed Khadeer Babu builds a world out of schoolyards, petty jealousies, street gossip, hunger, festivals, and awkward silences. And honestly, that refusal to be “loud” is what makes the book quietly powerful.

A refusal to perform

The English translation by DV Subhashri is central to why this is effective. This wasn’t an easy text to carry across languages – it’s deeply dialect-driven, rooted in the Nellore-Kavali rhythm of Telugu. The translation doesn’t sand down those edges. Instead of flattening everything into neutral, global-friendly English, she keeps the grain of the original. Words like “dadima” and “nannamma” remain, names stay intact, and the prose carries an Indian English cadence that feels lived-in rather than manufactured. As a reader, you feel like you’re stepping into a specific place, not a generic “small Indian town.”

One of the best things about this book is its stubborn refusal to perform “Muslimness” for the reader. In a time when Muslim lives in India are almost always shown through the lens of crisis, crime, or political panic, this book does something deceptively simple and deeply radical: it shows Muslim life as boring, funny, messy, affectionate, jealous, petty, tender. These aren’t characters built to teach you a moral. They’re built to exist. And that, in the current climate, feels like a political act in itself, which is a thought-out choice for the translator to pick as well.

The tone of the stories is “Chaplinesque”: there’s a gentle, absurd humour running through them, but it’s never empty. For example, in one story, the protagonist talks about how his class looked down on him because of his clothes: “I wore a wrinkled, dirty uniform … and torn-at-the-back chaddis … The prose is simple, but it’s not thin. Underneath that simplicity are sharp observations about poverty, caste, education, religion, and social power. I found myself thinking this is the kind of writing that looks light on the surface but slowly accumulates weight the further you go.

I also really appreciated how readable the translation is without feeling watered down. A lot of translated fiction can feel heavy, overworked, or overly polished. This doesn’t. It moves easily from scene to scene, memory to memory. At times, it reminded me of the quiet clarity of RK Narayan – that sense that something very plainspoken can still land heavy truths without raising its voice.

For example, in one story, the protagonist talks about his morning routine, tea without brushing their teeth, and the pleasure of sleeping in after waking up way too early. The translator captures the simple pleasures of daily routine and the nostalgia of daily life and habit well, along with the child-like voice of the boy who’s reminiscing in the present.

Whom is the book for?

That said, reading this in English also left me with a question: whom is this book really reaching? English translations of Indian language texts mostly circulate in urban, upper-caste, upper-class spaces – book festivals, university syllabi, glossy review pages. The children and communities this book is about are unlikely to ever be part of that audience.

This is where I think the translation really gets its ethics right. It doesn’t try to make these stories more comfortable; it lets them arrive with their roughness, their smells, their awkward pauses. It refuses to exoticise and also refuses to sanitise. That’s a hard balance to strike, and I think it pulls it off.

There’s also an unavoidable risk here: that these lives get consumed as “beautiful marginality” – as tasteful literary experiences rather than uncomfortable realities. But that’s not the book’s failure. That’s on us as readers. If anything, the book quietly asks you to sit with that discomfort rather than escape it.

By the time I finished, the book felt less like fiction and more like an emotional archive – a record of ways of living together that the present moment is actively trying to forget. It reminded me that coexistence isn’t a slogan; it’s built out of tiny, forgettable acts. Childhood is never apolitical, even when it doesn’t have the language for politics. And that language, especially when handled this carefully in translation, can carry memory far more faithfully than any ideology ever will.

That’s A Fire Ant Right There!: Tales From Kavali, Mohammed Khadeer Babu, translated from the Telugu by DV Subhashri, Speaking Tiger Books.