Translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
Published by Penguin India / And Other Stories, 2025, 216 pages. Original versions of stories first published in 2013 and 2023.

A woman whose husband leaves her for another woman is saved by her children; a man who becomes obsessed with a pair of high-heeled shoes forces his wife to wear them; and a woman is haunted by a broken promise to her maid.

These stories are about women from the Muslim community in southern India: a patriarchal society where women hardly have any rights and very little control over their lives. They are at the mercy of the men—fathers, husbands, brothers and maulvis.

In the title story, Mehrun’s husband Inayat is seeing another woman. Mehrun, distraught, turns to her family. But as a woman visiting without her husband, she is not welcome there. She is alone; her family will not help. In despair, she almost takes her own life, but her children save her.

In High-Heeled Shoe, Nayaz Khan is fascinated by a pair of shoes worn by his sophisticated sister-in-law Naseema. When the two couples go out shopping, he buys a pair for his wife Asifa, and forces her to wear them even though they do not fit her. Having indulged his obsession, he walks on ahead with his brother, leaving his wife to hobble behind him, not even bothering to turn around to help her when she falls.

But the women are not always docile and obedient to their men. In Black Cobras, Aashraf is sitting in the mosque with her daughters, waiting for a judgement on her petition. Her husband Yakub has abandoned her after their third daughter is born, without giving Aashraf any financial support. Aashraf petitions the mosque to make her husband pay. But the mutawalli[1] is not interested in her case and drags his feet. Meanwhile Aashraf and her children spend hours in the mosque waiting, hungry and cold, and eventually her sick baby dies. This has gone too far, and the women of the neighbourhood come out in force to curse and insult the mutawalli. Even his wife refuses to obey him anymore. This might not sound like retribution, but in a society where women are supposed to know their place, this is a rebellion.

Banu Mushtaq’s activism for women’s rights comes through in this collection. She is a writer, journalist and lawyer, and part of the Bandaya Sahitya movement, a protest against upper class and male-dominated writing in Kannada, a movement that encouraged women and religious and social minorities to tell their stories.

The stories have been selected by the translator Deepa Bhasthi from Mushtaq’s body of work. There is a lot of anger here, especially against the men. Mushtaq is scathing about the way society treats women: “when a wife dies, it’s like an elbow injury for the husband. … the pain is extreme for one instant—it is intolerable. But it lasts only a few seconds”. In Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal, the husband declares his undying love for his wife but takes another wife just 40 days after her death.

Which brings me to the men in these stories. There isn’t a single man that comes off well—they are all self-centred, domineering, and many of them mistreat their women. I know that Mushtaq is making a point, but surely, there are some good men around? It might have given more depth to the collection as a whole.

A word about the translation: Bhasthi’s translation keeps some of the original words and uses literal translations, such as “my home person” or gharwallah, which is how a wife would refer to her husband. She also uses Indian idiomatic English like “shining-shining” or hyperbole. In her afterward, Bhasthi says that, between them, she and Mushtaq speak several languages, and explains how Mushtaq’s stories use a mix of Kannada (including a dialect spoken by a particular community), Urdu, Arabic and Dakhni. Bhasthi does not use italics to mark out the non-English words—something that is now becoming more frequent—because it exoticizes the word and sets it apart. Her translation captures the inflections and intonations of the language.

I enjoyed reading this collection. Mushtaq makes it clear that, although she is writing about a particular community, the stories are not just about them. The problems she highlights here are ones faced by women around the world.

Although things have improved, we still have a long way to go before women are treated entirely as equals and given the respect they deserve.

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[1] A manager of a waqf, a religious or charitable endowment in Islam. He is responsible for managing the waqf property and its income according to the terms set by the waqf’s founder.