Remembering Ajay Gupta - Our Zeitgeist Interpreter

On July 22, we lost Ajay Gupta, who had joined Blaft in February. He died of a lung infection after a sudden onset of fever. He was just 32.

When he came on board, he told us he'd been out of the workforce for a few years due to a struggle with depression, but he had improved a lot with therapy and was looking for a part-time role, working from his home in Chandigarh. He had an M.Sc. in Biotechnology from Panjab University, but was looking to transition to publishing. "I bunked the whole first year to read in the university library," he wrote in his application letter. "The fiction section, of course."

He quickly proved himself extraordinarily capable, helping with copy editing, website wrangling, ebook digitization, marketing, and fulfillment. He was one of those very rare people that get excited about literature AND can also solve technology problems. We promoted him to the role of "Zeitgeist Interpreter" (a title he chose.)

He enjoyed working night shifts, just like we do. As we sat up in the wee hours passing files back and forth and updating foreign customers with their tracking numbers, we chatted about books, folklore, insects. He was a great fan of Joan Didion and Stephen King. He loved horror fiction and campy movies. He had recently discovered N. K. Jemisin and a bunch of other Black speculative fiction writers: we talked Nalo Hopkinson and Tananarive Due and Chesya Burke and 𝑺𝒊𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒓𝒔. He admired translators like Daisy Rockwell and Deepa Bhasthi and Jerry Pinto. Just a few weeks before he died, he made a solo trip to Kareri in Himachal where he did some casual research on the local ghosts. He had roots in Purvanchal and crazy stories from the village. He was fond of making weird little cryptic collage diagrams to update us on his work progress.

He wasn't with us long, and we never met him in person, but he was totally Blaft fam.

We will miss him immeasurably.