Choice by Neel Mukherjee

Riddled with climate anxiety, battling obsessive-compulsive disorder, Ayush can’t get over capitalism’s oversized destructive effect on the lives of ordinary people. Economics is life, life is economics, is a mantra that surfaces over and over again in the first long short story of three. Equally compelling is the final story in which the well-intentioned gift of a cow to a rural impoverished mother systematically unravels the family unit until the unexpected ending. Startling and dark, the stories are a perfect snapshot of life lived under the yoke of capitalism today. Choice is but an illusion, we all bear our burdens.