Is There a Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Anjali Deshpande’s Nobody Lights a Candle is quick-paced whodunnit novel that lays bare the horrors of sexual violence performed on women’s bodies as a physical expression of misogyny. A few pages into the novel, and the reader will be immediately reminded of the outrageous gang rape of Jyoti Singh (Nirbhaya) in Delhi 2012, or of Afsha in Hathras 2020, that morph from newspaper headlines to police archives, soon to be erased from social memory. And yet, what makes these two instances of sexual violence stand apart is the caste identity of the victims, where the former invited international debates regarding the safety of women in the country, the latter exposed the malicious nexus of the legal and judicial powers that effortlessly invisibilizes the marginalized. Deshpande craftily draws in the caste, gender and economic intersections in the novel to narrate what determines the fate of the afterlife of a woman who has been raped and murdered.