Landscapes of burden

Many stories from the recently Booker-shortlisted Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, have a distinct flavour. A fresh batch of biryani is a background character, as is the wafting scent of mensina saaru (pepper rasam), fish curry, ginger and garlic, or milky tea drunk at regular intervals.

Sometimes, the air is gently scented with fresh jasmine as two women huddle together in friendship. There is a sonic landscape as well to these stories — a garden of bird song, the cacophony of autos on city streets, the noise of children playing inside and outside homes, a particular turn of phrase, expletive or idiom in Dakhini or Kannada, or the lilt of an azaan. 

In this slim volume of 12 short stories, selected from a vast oeuvre of Banu Mushtaq’s writing career of three decades from 1990 to 2023, we are taken into the inner rooms and lives of Muslims in Karnataka. The stories have a strong sense of place, and we move from Nelamangala, Tumakuru, and Chikamagalur to the KRS dam or even on the Hajj. And within these worlds, Mushtaq makes us look at the stories of women and the many difficulties they face as mothers, mothers-in-law, daughters and wives, running their seragu over their eyes, heads and faces in tiredness while handling children, errant husbands and families.

Poignant and heartbreaking

Each story is told to us through slightly different perspectives — a kindly friend, a sister or daughter, a husband or a quiet onlooker. We meet gnarly and gritty grandmothers, scrambling and muddy children at play trying to find out who they are, thuggish and cruel men, and women driven to madness. There are languorous moments of everyday life, sometimes shattered by the drama of betrayal, hunger or communal tension, and the conflicted inner monologues of characters carrying the weight of society and its burdens. 

In the poignant and heartbreaking story Black Cobras, a young Aashraf seeks to find food and money for her little children from her husband who has taken a second wife, petitioning the mutawalli for resolution. The story does not hesitate to show us Aashraf’s difficulty, worry, and heartbreak, and the indifference and hypocrisy of the mutawalli and his interpretation of scriptures in favour of the husband. “Damn these men,” thinks Aashraf, as it seems, does Mushtaq in many of her stories, asking us to take a hard look at the challenging realities of how patriarchy and tradition can constraint women’s freedom.

In The Shroud, we see a mistress of a large bungalow, Shaziya, renege on a promise made to the very old, hardworking, poor and devout Yaseen Bua, and the many layers of class, caste and privilege that separate the two women in life and death.

In Heart Lamp, we see the tremendous grief and heartache that a woman can feel after a lifetime of raising children, tending to the ill, and being abandoned by a husband, and the final story seems to implore us, the readers and God: “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!” It is often a cruel world Mushtaq shows us, and the characters we meet are trying their best to look after their children, hapless husbands, customs and their own hearts and desires.

Keen eye

As Bhasthi tells us in the beautiful and educative translator’s note, Mushtaq’s entire career emerged from acts of dissent or Bandaya. In her activism and literature, her work speaks of the many ways human lives are constrained and circumscribed by tradition and patriarchy. She brings her keen perception, especially to the world she was raised in and knows intimately. In offering us slices of life from the world in which she grew up, her work brings to us a sphere of experiences, dialects and accents that are so fundamental to the rubric of Karnataka but also so often overlooked by the canon of Kannada literature. The selection of stories seems to ask us how to make room for the lesser-understood lives of Muslim women living in today’s India of far-right politics but also offers us stories of sisterhood.

As said by the translator Bhasthi, “The particulars may be different, but at the core is a resistance to being controlled.” At the heart of this novel is resistance and a burning desire for freedom. We are lucky as readers that such a book has found its way to shores far and wide.