“The Vandal” by Vaidhy Mahalingam / Solstice Literary Magazine
"Sometimes He takes away one thing dear to you, so you can see new paths."
Reduce a story, boil it down to its essence, and what are you left with?
If you’re an elementary school student, you’re taught it’s beginning, middle, end.
If you’re an MFA student, it’s probably inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, resolution.
But when the schooling is done, after you’ve learned the rules well enough to let them percolate on the back burner, I’d advocate for something more audience-focused:
How do you engage a reader? Where do you take a reader? Where do you leave a reader?
When I’m writing a first draft, I let my freak flag fly and allow the story to drag me where it will, let the characters whisper in my ear. But when the time comes for revisions, I think it’s a good idea, for a while at least, to take a seat in the balcony and imagine how the thing will play “on stage.”
What is the audience (your reader) experiencing? What are they expecting? What can you tweak to subvert that expectation and surprise or delight them?
I’m fully convinced that the last 5% of changes made to a story in later drafts are the most valuable, the most potent, if only because you finally have enough of a handle on the whole to stop following whims or instinct. It’s here that you can rebuild with genuine intent.
Let’s spend some time in Vaidhy Mahalingam’s exhilarating “The Vandal” (3,500 words), in the winter 2025 issue of Solstice Literary Magazine. Keep on the lookout for his great choices as you read it.
1. How do you engage a reader?
The opening paragraph is notable, at first, for its utility and its efficiency. We’re introduced to our main character, Charu, an Indian woman approaching fifty, who is completing a half-hour walk to a Krishna temple in northern California. She’s reminiscing about her time in Tennessee thirty-five years prior, back when she was a new arrival in the US and so terrified of appearing “foreign” in public.
Then we get this (content warning, incoming blue language):
“But where she is now, were she to be confronted by one of those gun-toting skinheads she used to be terrified of encountering, she would only feel gratitude for him if he were to relieve her of her existence. Just pull the trigger, dude. Hey, didn’t you hear me? Blow my fucking brains out. Please!”
…so, all is not well with Charu.
Consider this reader engaged.
2. Where do you take a reader?
The stage is quickly set. Charu has come to the temple to meet up with four friends, all of them members of her “divorcee gang,” all of them “living on the wrong side of short, bad marriages.”
The third-person narration stays close on Charu, but not so much that there isn’t room for lyrical descriptions that ground us again after the face-slap of the possibility of homicidal splatter in the opener.
The women, we learn, have given up on romance, for lack of a better word.
“And now, realizing where they had all arrived, they had resigned themselves to seeking Krishna and each other, having found a tiny place in the world where they could feign happiness.”
However, that doesn’t stop Mahalingam from dropping us into a Romance-with-a-capital-R. How he goes about that task is both the trick and the charm.
You’ll maybe recall a Shoutout from a month ago—Hannah Kingsley-Ma’s great “Independent Living”—which I argued “contemporize[d] the idea of the Love Story.”
Mahalingam does something similar here, but in an even funkier way. There are moments in “The Vandal” when he comes damn close to jumping genres (out of romance and into thriller, nearly into horror) through shrewd use of that close-third point-of-view.
Talk about taking a reader somewhere. Better still, taking us somewhere unexpected.
Once we’re established in the temple and have settled into the chaste world of the divorcee gang, Charu has a reconnection with her longtime friend, Kavya. They discuss what is at the heart of Charu’s despair; her troubled and increasingly dangerous son, Anup, who is nineteen and has “severe mental health and substance abuse issues.” Anup’s most recent infraction was stealing Charu’s new truck and goading police into a high-speed chase that led to the vehicle’s impoundment (the reason for Charu walking to the temple) and his expensive bail-out from jail.
A quick pause here to appreciate the genius of Anup as an antagonist…
Every writing craft book ever published notes that antagonists need to be formidable, unstoppable, and made of sterner stuff than the hero. The tougher the foe, the higher the stakes, right?
Is there anything more indominable than a loving parent’s wayward child?
I’m waaay burying the lede here in only now getting to Kavya’s introduction of Vineet—a pleasant and patient older gentleman—to Charu…the matchmaking ostensibly the reason for Kavya’s appearance at the temple to begin with.
Charu begrudgingly accepts a ride home with Vineet, and that trip in his car, which accounts for most of the second half of the story, does the near-genre-hopping I mentioned above. It takes the expectation of the budding romance attached to an evening car ride home and flips it on its head over and over again. It’s an exceptionally finely wrought scene, an un-put-downable handful of pages. I want to write more about it, but I don’t want to steal its thunder! Be sure to check it out for yourself.
3. Where do you leave a reader?
When the smoke of the dramatic evening car ride home clears, Vaidhy Mahalingam gives us what seems to be a gentle denouement in the form of a follow-up text the next morning, sent by a concerned suitor (Vineet) to the object of his affection (Charu).
Depending on your personal experiences in life, you’ll either see that text as the callous recommendation of a sociopath, or the most badass, heroic and leading-man-worthy action possible.
It leaves Charu immobile in bed, wrapped in a comforter, “her body […] freezing in fear.”
In a romance? Bet you weren’t expecting that :) To which I’d add; precisely the point.
But Mahalingam leaves his readers, at the very end, with a joke. And a damned funny one. A great and much needed relief & release.
And a well-earned chef’s kiss.
Solstice Literary Magazine publishes fiction, poetry, nonfiction, photography and graphic lit.
From their website:
“We experiment. We publish fine work, of course, from published established writers to emerging writers, whether formal or informal, traditional or experimental. We also publish underserved writers, or writers on the margins. We publish writers of diverse nationalities, races and religions, and also writers from diverse cultures within our culture.”
“Our standards are high. All work will be vetted; that is, read by preliminary readers, then referred to our editors, so that readers can look for some fine juried pieces.”
“The Solstice Institute, sponsor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, is an independent, freestanding 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We sponsor literary contests in order to showcase unique voices. We also do outreach to community writing groups on the fringes in order to publish new, unheard voices.”
“In short, we want to present colliding, diverse, sometimes controversial, points of view. We want to stir dialogue among our readers.”
“We believe probing into diversity can promote unity. We want to shake things up. Cause some ferment. After all, Solstice is renewal.”
Solstice is not currently open for submissions, but keep an eye on their Submittable page for when they are.
And check out more of Vaidhy Mahalingam’s work at his website.
Many thanks to Vaidhy Mahalingam and Solstice Literary Magazine for the captivating “The
Vandal.”
Are you reading enough short stories to know what lit pubs are looking for?
Don’t have the time to search for them on your own and still get writing done?
Short Story Shoutout can help.
Subscribe and get introduced to the best online fiction weekly for the low, low cost of nothing.
Comments