Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp is a collection of twelve stories translated adequately by Deepa Bhasthi from Kannada to English. The book’s triumph in the International Booker Prize a couple of days ago is a source of great satisfaction for the entire Indian community.
This book features a well structured selection of 12 stories from Banu’s many published works across a range of collections. The readers have both praised and typecast the compilation as representative of South Indian Muslim society. While these stories explore the transitional phase where male-female relationships undergo troubled evolution, many readers may still find them lacking in novelty as the plot structures remain familiar and the atmosphere feels stale, despite the altered geographical settings. Banu states that these stories emerged from her lived and witnessed experiences. If readers feel that the subject matter in these stories has already been exhaustively used, it doesn’t represent an artistic failure. Instead, it’s a social tragedy that inequality is so deeply entrenched that we need fiction to perceive what surrounds us in everyday life.
Besides this, the stories are full of all kinds of substance that compels me as a reader in writing this piece.
The majority of the stories, like Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal, Fire-rain etc., deal with the subjects of societal disparity and adaptation. Reserved, unseen, unnamed and overlooked characters are the heroines of these stories. This may not be the most prominent aspect of the stories, nor is it suggested that such characters haven’t appeared elsewhere. Yet, the social function they serve here remains compelling and worthy of attention.
Today we talk about the story Fire Rain,the second story, in the list of 12 stories written by her.
In the story Fire Rain, the antagonist, Mutawalli, is irritated by his sister’s demand for a share in the family property. In an attempt to avoid confronting this domestic conflict, he immerses himself in leading a communal issue. He devotes all his energy to spotlighting a communal incident, and other family members, including his sister, join in with veiled complicity. However, when the situation backfires, the very questions of property division and household responsibility that Mutawalli was trying to escape resurface.
This is a powerful story about gendered access to social roles, showing how men often redirect attention to seemingly noble public causes as a way of evading uncomfortable personal inequities. It also reveals how conflicts tied to religious identity can be carefully constructed, and how they often remain separate from the broader and more pressing struggles against everyday injustice.
In these stories, men are almost entirely absent from crucial and confrontational conversations, such as those related to divorce, remarriage, household decisions, or safety concerns. A pervasive sense of entitlement in all the stories infringes upon the right of others to choose their own happiness and freedom.
“Fire Rain” leaves a lasting impression with its raw emotion and vivid imagery, capturing the turmoil beneath everyday life. Through its intense narrative, Banu Mushtaq explores themes of resilience, pain, and hope, reminding us how even in the harshest storms, there’s a flicker of light that refuses to fade. The story stays with you long after the last line, urging reflection on the human spirit’s strength amidst chaos.
Banu Mushtaq’s stories often feel like they happen nowhere in particular. There is a strong sense of local life in the way people speak and relate to each other. To talk about the translation, the target language of a translation can give both the book and its author a new shape, a new world. For readers like me, this translation feels easy to read and understand. It should be appreciated not just as a piece of fiction, but also for the way it handles translation.
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