Rohinton Mistry’s short story “The Scream” is narrated by a man of a “great age” living in India in the same house with several generations of his family. Relegated to sleeping on a mattress in the front room of the house and urinating into bottles during the night, the old man keeps constant vigil out his window, remarking upon the muscular men who hold court across the road, the peanut salesmen who pass by, and other denizens of the neighbourhood. One night, the man is woken from his sleep by a scream from outside and the sounds of a stranger being assaulted.

Is the scream real, or is the man’s entire narration the product of an addled mind riven by senescence? The man’s children tell him that it is only his imagination playing tricks on him: “Every day they tell me I have lost my mind, my memory, my sense of reality.” There is evidence to support this claim: the old man mistakes his grandchild for a servant, and he harbours an irrational fear of losing “a few fingers or toes” to the mice that roam his room at night.

There is a dash of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” in Mistry’s narrative approach here; we are never entirely certain whether to take the man’s story at face value or whether his entire narration is the result of his steadily progressing dementia. The process of disentangling the skein of this brief narrative provides the story’s essential pleasure and interest.

This edition of “The Scream” includes mixed-media artwork by Tony Urquhart, which complements the various elements of the prose narrative. All royalties are being donated to World Literacy of Canada.