For King’s characters, war is not just a flash on the nightly news, but ever-present and unavoidable, in real time or in recurring memory.
She realised that as Noor Ahmad she at least felt like a person. As Nooria, she returned to being a shadow. Returning was harder than changing.
To read Mahapatra’s stories is to experience defamiliarisation, which occurs when the literary language disrupts habitual perception by making the ordinary appear extraordinary and the extraordinary disturbingly ordinary.
Three women, one real as far as history is concerned and the other two drawn from the pages of Tagore, inspired by that real woman—the notun bouthan who was Tagore’s muse and who died tragically.
I lifted my maroon apron from the cold marble slab. Its golden embroidery curled into spelling my name, Arun; Wong. Most people stop at Arun.
