Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Children of a Lesser God
“Hakhdaar tarse toh angaar ka nuuh barse… If the one who has rights is displeased, a rain of fire will fall.” – Fire Rain; Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq.
A bandaya at heart
Activist, journalist, lawyer, and writer, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, a collection of 12 stories, is just that – a rain of fire that sears the conscience. A bandaya at heart, Mushtaq tells stories of dissent and rebellion, speaking for the voiceless, addressing themes of patriarchy, gender, and class conflicts within the grassroots of the Muslim community in Karnataka.
Mushtaq’s subjects are primarily women and children, the likes of whom she would have encountered in her long career as a lawyer and activist. She was deeply influenced by the Bandaya Sahitya movement of the 70s and the 80s, and eschewing popular or romantic fiction, as Deepa Bhashti, the translator of Heart Land, puts it in her note to the reader, “sought out narratives that critiqued patriarchy and its hypocritical traditions and practices.”
Marginalized voices
Though they are marginalized voices from Mushtaq’s own community, with their unique norms and cultural practices, there is a universality about the issues the women – and by extension – their children face. The neglect, the apathy, the violence are universal, as is the sisterhood that bands them together in their fight for survival.
The fulcrum that holds is the resistance to being controlled, to being denied basic rights – rights to education, to a rightful share in property, to a home, and to life itself. These are issues that transcend culture, community, and country. As Bhasti writes, “Some of us step on the cindering balls of coal and carve a space for ourselves. Some of us learn to exist too close to the fire. None of us are left unscarred.”
In tones that alternate between witty and tragic, Mushtaq celebrates this resistance and the resilience of women. But there is an overriding mood of bleakness, underlining cruelty, neglect, and apathy.
A Stone Slab for Shaista Mahal
The first story in the collection is A Stone Slab for Shaista Mahal, a first-person narrative in a witty, informal, and colloquial style. Iftekar, a middle-aged man with a brood of children, has begotten his beloved wife Shaista with her seventh child. He loves her to the moon and back, and promises to build her a mausoleum akin to the Taj, but on Shaista’s passing, he gets a new wife in the blink of an eye.
In the final image, the reader sees Asifa, their eldest teenage daughter, left holding the brood of her younger siblings, a bleak look on her eyes, and the burdens of raising them on her shoulders. “Somewhere in the distance, Shaista was probably whispering, ‘She is not my daughter, she is my mother…”
Heart Lamp
The titular story, Heart Lamp, is about Mehrun, who returns to her parental home after a crisis, predictably to be rejected and sent back. “As evening started to lose its light, lamps were lit around the house. But the lamp in Mehrun’s heart had been extinguished a long time ago.”
Mehrun’s life was as black as the darkness of the night. Until Salma, her eldest, with her infant sister in her arms, rushed to grab Mehrun from the jaws of death. She implores her mother, “You are ready to die for Abba, but is it not possible for you to live for our sakes?”
Black Cobras
Black Cobras, perhaps the best-crafted story in this collection, is a chorus of protests against institutionalized injustice. Abdul Kader Saheb, the muttawali of a mosque, tasked with imparting justice to all, avoids giving his impoverished sister her rightful share of the family property. He also denies justice to Aashraf, another petitioner, being in cahoots with her husband.
The cat and mouse game of avoidance and distraction takes on farcical proportions until a supreme tragedy shakes the power-struck muttawali out of his stupor. He who held his head high in the community now walked down the street, his shoulders hunched, while women who never before dared to look him in the eye sniggered and cursed him, like the black cobras spewing their venom:
‘May Allah’s curse fall on you. It feels like I saw Shaitan in person.’
‘You will be born with a pig face on Judgement Day. May black cobras coil themselves around you.’
In the tragi-comic A Decision of the Heart, Yusuf rides a pendulum of loyalties between his mother and wife, Akhila, and ends up arranging his mother’s remarriage. ‘Akhila, ‘ he said, “may you also have the good fortune of having your children arrange your wedding,’ and spat out enough bitterness for a lifetime.
Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!
The closing story of the collection is Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord! In a strident voice, the unnamed protagonist, long-suffering from dowry extortions, sexual abuse, and violence, exhorts the lord, Prabhu, to experience life on earth as a woman, once, just once!
With roots in Hassan, Karnataka, Mushtaq belonged to a progressive family and had the advantage of being educated in Kannada, which was uncommon for Muslims then. Her spoken language at home is Dakhni, a unique blend of Persian, Dehlavi, Kannada, Marathi, and Telugu. This multilingualism or ‘code-switching’ is reflected in the stories and comes out through Bhasti’s translations.
The International Booker Prize and other literary milestones
In winning the International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi created a new milestone for Indian literature as the first short-story collection to win the International Booker Prize, and the first original writing in Kannada. In another first, Heart Lamp also won the PEN English Translates Award for 2024.