By Devangi Bhatt. Translated from the Gujarati original by Mudra Joshi

After this delusory incident for the first time nobody notices the change in Pauloma’s behaviour and however much she tries to confess to her husband that there was another world in the vessels, no one really cares about her irrational beliefs. Soon she is drawn to the storeroom once again and now she is transported to Cairo in Egypt where she lives as Princess Rabiya Abdi. Set during the period of the cultural revolution in Egypt during the 1950s, Rabiya is exposed to another world when her husband brings in an outsider, a bohemian painter from London, to draw her portrait.


Reviewed by: Somdatta Mandal
By Vaasanthi. Translated from the original Tamil by Radhika Meganathan and the author

Rohini, Malini, Malathi and Paatti are as shackled by their own upbringing and values instilled in them since childhood as they are buffeted by the winds of change and an awareness of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal set up. There is no doubt that the ‘times they are a-changin’ as Bob Dylan sang. Yet there is a sluggishness with which it does exact a heavy price on women, leading to mental imbalance, loss and despair.


Reviewed by: Malati Mathur
By Arupa Patangia Kalita. Translated from the original Assamese by Mitra Phukan

‘Rajmao: The Queen Mother’ traces the journey of Komola whose motherhood confers on her the identity of being Purobi’s mother, and it is in the attempt to fulfil her duties as a mother that she attains the grandiose name of Rajmao but only after paying a terrible price for it. ‘By the Clock’ introduces us to Ghori-Koka-Aita and the tyranny of the grandfather’s clock which becomes a metonym for the authoritarian presence of her husband.


Reviewed by: Shibani Phukan
Compiled by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca.

Mendonca’s memoir unfolds the joys of having an eminent poet as one’s father, and at the same time, the unhappiness of growing up in a broken family. She remarks that he was overjoyed at her birth and called her his ‘best poem’. He named her ‘Kavita’, which means ‘poem’ in Hindi. According to Mendonca, he was a loving father to his three children, two daughters and a son—Kavita, Kalpana and Elkana.


Reviewed by: Shyamasri Maji
By Keki N. Daruwalla

Like Ted Hughes, Daruwalla draws our attention to the natural habitat, an earth that is home for birds and animals, plants and rocks. ‘Winter Migration’ has images of ‘dall sheep’, ‘rust-coloured rocks’, ‘dwarf birch’, ‘antlers’; ‘wolves’, ‘bear’, and ‘the Arctic tern’, ‘the marmot’ and ‘the squirrel’ wake up and move, or decide not to leave. The story of the ‘Alaskan Bear named Sky’ in the poem ‘Mother Bear’ brings alive the instinct of motherhood and responsibilities associated with it. The mother protects and nurtures her young cubs with much love and caution.


Reviewed by: Ranu Uniyal
By Anju Makhija

The poetry collection by Vinay Sharma moves deeper into an inner terrain. The idea of change is not driven by external factors alone, but by the dissolving of the inner boundaries. The slipping of selves happens so fluidly in this moving, shape-shifting book that I now hold in my hands. It becomes difficult, almost impossible to pin these poems down, for time and space seem to have no fixed hold over the words that inhabit these pages.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali