Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Award-winning author
Nina Sudhakar is an author of Telugu heritage who was born and raised in Connecticut. She is also a lawyer, mother, poet, and short story writer. Her latest book, Where to Carry the Sound, won the 2024 Katherine Anne Porter Prize and is a Foreword Indies Book of the Year Winner.
Sudhakar has also published two chapter books of poetry, Matriarchtypes (Bird’s Thumb, 2018) and Embodiments (Sutra Press, 2019).
Rooted in realism
The stories in this debut short story collection are vividly imagined and original. They are rooted in realism, but this realism is exotic. They are tales of enchantment, with elements of speculative fiction, folklore, magical realism, science fiction, and none of the endings are predictable.
Six of the nine stories in this book have previously appeared in reputable literary journals like The Rumpus, Sonora Review, and The Offing, and some have won prizes.
Almost all these stories are situated in India. Sometimes the location is stated, as in the ‘Empires Have Been Destroyed’, a story about a mother and daughter who run a speakeasy in Bandra, Mumbai, or ‘The Peak of Eternal Light’, which is set in a lunar space station. The Himalayas are featured in ‘Bloom’.
Marigolds
Other stories are set in unspecified locations in India; while growing up, the author visited India regularly. The protagonist in ‘Marigolds’, a story with elements of magical realism, lives alone “at the edge of the world.” She travels through a portal to another unnamed world, where everyone she encounters mistakes her for her mother, and when she returns via the portal to the place she left, her mother can no longer recognize her. ‘Come Tomorrow’ is similarly set in an unnamed village.
A feminist perspective
These stories are from the feminist perspective. The narrator is always female, the woman is the agent, and the mother-daughter relationship figures in more than one story. In most of them, fathers are either dead or absent, daughters are abandoned by their mothers, or the mothers die. For example, in ‘A Working Theory of Optical Illusions’, a young woman who has lost her mother embarks on a journey to India in search of the father she never knew.
The women have careers. The protagonist of ‘Come Tomorrow’ is a photographer. Women archaeologists are working on a dig in Andhra Pradesh in ‘A Body Is More Than Flesh and Bone’. An old woman knows the secrets of making perfume. She runs a perfume distillery in her garden and is instrumental in capturing a man-eating tigress in ‘In the Forest of the Night’.
Each of these stories is unique in terms of story, setting, points of view, and voice. ‘The Pillow Book of the Dead Prince’s Intended’, for instance, is an adaptation of a Kannada folktale, ‘The Dead Prince and the Talking Doll’, collected by A.K. Ramanujan in The Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India.
Varied viewpoints
Sudhakar also experiments with different points of view. For instance, ‘Empires Have Been Destroyed’ is told in the second person, addressing the reader – “If the right street in Bandra had been whispered to you, it is said, a street named after a canonized Catholic saint, whose very name you could hold in your mouth like a prayer to a patron saint, you could take a rickshaw to the area…”
Time, too, is dispensed with. These stories could have taken place at any time in the 20th or 21st centuries, adding to the fairy-tale nature of the stories.
West Bengal
She brings a lyrical imagination and a poet’s mindset to her stories. The protagonist in “A Working Theory of Optical Illusion” is a photographer who travels to Darjeeling in West Bengal in search of her father. She asks her driver to take her to Tiger Hill to see the sunrise and see Mount Kanchenjunga, and perhaps Mount Everest.
“I arrived in pitch darkness, using my phone’s flashlight to follow the dirt path, leading up from the parking lot. The sunrise grew outward from the faintest pinprick of light. The shifts in color extending across the sky in gradient bands were imperceptible when they registered in my peripheral vision. Eventually, I blinked, and the sky was filled with radiant daylight.”
The reader of this review must have been intrigued by the unique titles of these stories. I certainly was.
Magic realism
Sudhakar does her research. ‘Bloom’, about a tribe that travels to a mountain in the Himalayas to see a flower that blooms just once a year, was inspired by an actual avalanche in the Himalayas. As the avalanche occurs, the women in the party who seek shelter in a cave are trapped. Real-life incidents are woven with fantasy and magic realism, and they take us to places of enchantment.
To sum up, I loved it! Hope you enjoy it too.
