The novel is premised on the inner lives of three eponymous and devoted women on the Coromandel Coast during British imperialism. Their intertwined lives along the Coromandel coast aim to recover and reframe the personal and public lives of women in the subcontinent, especially during the British colonial period.
Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I’d never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles here and reminiscing about my own.
At one point in Rimli Sengupta’s debut novel A Lost People’s Archive (2023) the ghost of the novel’s protagonist Shishu laments that Indians never kept archives unlike Romans and Chinese
Mallika’s memory loss of three days. From there on we are led on a voyage of perspectives, and each of them showcases the richness of the inner lives of these characters.
Arefa Tehsin’s work of fiction The Witch in the Peepul Tree gives a peek into the myriad changes unfolding in the nation through the lives of the people in Dada Bhai’s house.
The poetry here is not in-your-face. Its intention is not to shout out, convert or proclaim; never wanting to draw attention to its intense gaze and its whispered yet assertive commenting voice.
This is a collection I have enjoyed reading.