Heart Lamp, a review

 

Heart Lamp

Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhashti

I finished reading Heart Lamp within a week of receiving it. In a time when sustained attention feels increasingly elusive, completing twelve short stories over seven days felt like a big win. As I read, I kept asking myself why I stayed with the book so steadily. The answer emerged gradually: the deeper I went, the more I was drawn into the lives of the men and women portrayed in these stories, and into the social worlds they inhabited. Reading them took me back to my own childhood—growing up as a young girl in a rural village in southern India, with rules and ways of living clearly charted out for her. Almost every story carried traces of my life or the lives of women I have known.

Heart Lamp is a selected collection of twelve short stories written in Kannada over three decades (1990–2023) by Banu Mushtaq, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi. I recently listened to Bhasthi speak at a literature festival, where she described her approach as “translating with an accent”—a deliberate effort to shape English into something culturally embedded rather than neutral or flattened. That idea stayed with me as I read, and it became one of my most compelling experiences of the book. The translation does not treat English as a destination language that must absorb and smooth out the original; instead, it treats translation as a creative, ethical act—one that allows the source language to leave its marks.

The stories are rooted in everyday lives, largely of women and young girls from Muslim communities in southern India. They map domestic spaces, religious practices, legal and social constraints, and the small rebellions that puncture them. Much of the book’s power lies in its authenticity of speech and gesture. Conversations unfold as they might in open courtyards or kitchen spaces of rural homes—unadorned, intimate, punctuated by silences that carry as much meaning as words. These nuances resonated deeply with me, to the extent that I often forgot I was reading a translation. The reading felt effortless because the translation does not attempt to outshine or sanitize the original for an Anglophone audience. Instead, it retains linguistic textures and cultural specificities, allowing the reader to step into a world rather than merely observe it from the outside.

Mushtaq writes about gender, caste, and social and political pressures with remarkable restraint. She places these realities on the page without explanatory scaffolding or overt moral commentary. At times, this has the quality of documentary transcription, but it also underscores a more unsettling realization: the truths recorded in stories written thirty years ago remain largely intact today. The themes transcend geography and culture. As one moves through the collection, it becomes clear that while external markers of comfort and convenience may have changed over time, the underlying structures of power have not.

Across most of the stories, male authority—familial, religious, or social—defines women’s roles and limits their agency. Marriage, in particular, is rarely portrayed as an emotional partnership; instead, it functions as a system in which women are often socially replaceable and materially undervalued. Yet Mushtaq resists framing her characters as passive victims. Within these constraining structures, women find subtle ways to assert themselves: by petitioning authorities, caring fiercely for their children, using strategic humor, or simply telling their stories. A mother’s exhaustion, a child’s cunning, the small compromises partners make—these are scenes that feel instantly recognizable across cultures and eras. By focusing on kitchens, rites, marketplaces, and laws, Mushtaq grounds the stories firmly in their social contexts while giving readers access to older, enduring emotional truths.

One of the most striking achievements of the collection is how small, seemingly ordinary scenes accumulate into quiet indictments of patriarchy and social inertia. Moments that could easily be rendered as high drama are presented with emotional restraint. Mushtaq avoids melodrama and refuses simplistic villain–victim binaries. Her narrative distance allows the weight of the situations to emerge organically, trusting the reader to engage ethically with what is shown rather than what is explained.

Stories such as Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal, Heart Lamp, and Black Cobras exemplify this approach. They reveal how marriage, religion, and community intersect to shape women’s lives, often leaving them with limited choices and fragile support systems. Equally important is Mushtaq’s attention to how children absorb and internalize these gendered norms from an early age, learning to read power, silence, and expectation long before they can articulate them.

One story that stands apart in tone and treatment is A Taste of Heaven. Here, three children attempt to comfort their dying great-aunt by blending imagination with local cultural symbols, reinterpreting religious imagery in ways that are tender, inventive, and deeply humane. The innocence and curiosity of the children lend the story a lightness that momentarily lifts it above the heavier adult concerns of belief, mortality, and communal obligation, without diminishing their seriousness.

In a literary moment where lesser-known voices and marginal histories are increasingly sought out, Heart Lamp makes a lasting impact. It pairs precise, unsentimental storytelling with a translation strategy that preserves regional texture, resulting in a work that feels both intimately local and broadly human. The English text retains Kannada, Urdu, and Arabic terms and idioms, allowing the language to carry its original cadence and cultural weight. Rather than smoothing difference, the book insists that the English reader do some cultural learning of their own.

This insistence—formal, ethical, and linguistic—is what gives Heart Lamp its quiet durability. Readers looking for plot-driven narratives or dramatic arcs may find the book’s interior focus and slow-burning revelations less immediately gripping. But for the attentive reader, it becomes clear that the collection’s strength lies in accumulation rather than spectacle. Long after individual stories end, their moral and emotional aftershocks continue to linger, inviting return and reconsideration well beyond the moment of reading.