Book review: ‘Heart Lamp’ asks in whom women can really put their faith

During this same afternoon, the women and their husbands stumble into a conversation about love. Shaista’s husband declares that if he were an emperor, he’d have built her a palace that would put the Taj Mahal to shame. Zeenat’s husband, though, is dismissive. To him, the Taj Mahal is no more than a grave, an apologia from an emperor who had countless other women at his disposal. But Zeenat quietly wishes her husband, too, would shower her with a love as passionate as the one she believes Shaista receives.

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Towards the end of the story, Shaista dies unexpectedly after childbirth. Her husband doesn’t build her a Taj Mahal. Instead, he marries another woman. “I need someone to look after the children," he tells Zeenat, who runs out of the building, distraught.

Such layered portraits of kinship, desire and social respectability form the spine of Mushtaq’s collection, which has been shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. Almost every one of the 12 stories—written between 1990 and 2023—enters Muslim homes in western Karnataka to reveal the burdens and ambitions of women who keep these homes intact despite the indifference of men. Thoughtfully translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasti, these stories are filled with overworked and sexually dissatisfied wives, daughters who desperately want to resume their studies, mothers who turn their sons into unreliable husbands, and religious leaders who are unsure of their moral judgements even as an entire community looks to them for certitude.

The frames of Mushtaq’s stories might be small (they are usually focused on a single family), but they burst at the seams with action. Fresh characters arrive seemingly from nowhere, names pile up quickly, dialogues are abandoned midway, and friendships form in the span of half a paragraph. The many turns in plot come suddenly, too, as women die with little warning and the most patriarchal of men soften for a fleeting moment. If the arcs of Mushtaq’s stories are unpredictable, then it is because she wants to foreground the immensity and intricacy of women’s anguish in a violent world of men. “You lie there like a corpse," a husband tells his wife in more than one story, as Mushtaq reminds us that even in the face of their little freedoms, women are reduced to their sexual function.

Mushtaq, who is a lawyer and activist, began her literary career as part of the dissident Bandaya Sahitya movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which championed Dalit, Muslim and women’s voices in the Kannada language. This translated compilation of her work, too, is a testament to her foundational politics. But Mushtaq isn’t interested in moral high grounds or easy categorisations of victims and perpetrators.

In a deliciously frenetic story, A Decision of the Heart, a wife who is fiercely jealous of her husband’s pandering to his elderly widowed mother, drives him to breaking point—he resolves to get his mother married in a “Panjabi dress…with gold jewellery all over her body." Husband, wife, and mother then each try to manipulate the bizarre situation to their own ends, while the community mutely watches the drama unfold. Clearly a comment on widow remarriage and personal law systems, the story ends inevitably, with the man’s triumph. In Mushtaq’s world, women do not have to be virtuous to be oppressed, and men do not have to be monsters to be guilty.

It isn’t easy to translate these stories where emotions are nearly always fever-pitched, and characters beat their breasts as they curse each other. In her translator’s note, where she critiques (rightly, in my opinion) italics and footnotes, Bhasti notes how Mushtaq often switches registers of Kannada, using colloquial idioms and Dakhani phrases that are common to the region’s Muslim communities. Bhasti insists on retaining many of these idiomatic phrases literally—“he became like hot coal" or “like costume jewellery in a dirty cloth"—to drive home the sense of orality in the narrative.

At their best, such moments lend confidence and even a jagged charm to the prose. But this insistence on reminding readers of the “original" doesn’t always work. For instance, most often, aphorisms are transliterated and then translated, breaking up the cadence of a sentence. At other times, like when a character remembers a song about a pig, the lyrics aren’t translated. Why not? We are only told in the following exegetical paragraph, “The meat of a pig is haram. Likewise anger." Because the translation seems so purposeful with its choices, I question these moments when it works against its own project.

Perhaps the triumph of Bhasti’s translation is that she conveys the dark humour that suffuses what are deeply painful stories. The humour also helps pick up the pace of the collection when it feels like the stories’ themes are beginning to repeat. Mushtaq, for her part, doesn’t want us to pity her characters, but live among their ordinary sorrows and absurdities. In a sense, the humour she employs is also a measure against paternalistic readings of Muslim communities that might see their customs as backward or odd or both.

Red Lungi, for instance, is a disturbing yet hilarious account of a mass circumcision ritual in which men and boys grapple with power, shame and physical agony. In The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri, a Muslim woman lawyer employs an Arabic tutor for her daughters, only to learn that he is deliriously obsessed with gobi manchuri—a “vegetarian whatever-its-called" dish that nobody seems to know how to make correctly. The fried cauliflower snack, of course, ends up as a metaphor for more sinister, misogynistic desires—the subversion is masterful.

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It might be tempting to read Mushtaq’s stories as rooted critiques of Hindu majoritarianism, and in one sense, they are. When a character invokes Shakuni from the Mahabharata, another replies, “When learning the Qur’an is the big story here, don’t bring in the Ramayana and Mahabharata to distract me. Then someone else will enter the conversation and it will become a different thing altogether." And yet, Mushtaq’s imaginative world is finer than ethnographic argument. “I do not engage in extensive research," she has said, “my heart itself is my field of study."

This candour is apparent in her stories. Her characters are delightfully insecure, and the stories have no decisive takeaway. The only moral clarity she offers us is on the condition of women. In the concluding story, Be a Woman once, Oh Lord!, the narrator (a Muslim woman) charges God, “If you were to build the world again…do not be like an inexperienced potter." We are left to then consider, at the of the day, who can these women really put their faith in?

Poorna Swami is a writer and translator from Bengaluru.