Few books succeed in rendering the experience of leave-taking, at once emotional, relational, and profoundly existential, with such penetrating insight and intellectual force as does Ritu Menon’s edited collection. It is a capacious and carefully curated architecture that gathers a remarkable spectrum of literary and expressive forms: poems and memoir, autobiographical vignettes and fragments, hybrid texts that refuse easy categorization. These varied modes converge around a constellation of concerns: love and loss, memory and trauma, each illuminating the others through their formal differences. The anthology draws together fifteen contributions from writers whose vocations span fiction, journalism, scholarship, and linguistics. It is precisely this disciplinary diversity that enriches the volume’s central preoccupation, as each contributor brings not merely expertise but a distinctive interpretive sensibility shaped by their craft.
The volume’s title merits particular attention: A Stone Thrown in a Pond: Essays and Poems on the Enigma of Leaving. This carefully chosen metaphor captures the cascading nature of departure itself, the way a single event generates concentric waves of consequence that travel outward to touch unpredictable shores. The title of the book originates in Jerry Pinto’s essay, where he reflects on leaving as an act whose repercussions extend far beyond the originating moment. The enigma invoked in the title mirrors the fundamentally elusive nature of leave-taking itself, inviting readers into the complexities and ambiguities that characterize this most universal yet irreducibly personal of experiences.
Pinto deepens this terrain into a gendered critique of leave-taking, arguing that the very notion of leaving is profoundly shaped by patriarchal imagination. While women may harbour the desire to leave, this longing is routinely romanticized or appropriated by men, rarely granted the legitimacy of action. As he succinctly observes, ‘Women don’t leave. Men do.’ Even when men remain physically rooted, they cultivate elaborate fantasies of escape: the open road, the shedding of obligations, the allure of unbounded movement. Such imaginaries, Pinto suggests, draw sustenance from a cultural landscape shaped by the veneration of fakirs, sadhus, wanderers, and mendicants, figures who embody a socially-sanctioned ideal of renunciation that evokes both awe and envy. These are male archetypes of leaving, their freedom consecrated by tradition.
Pinto develops this argument through a close reading of Bollywood’s narrative and musical archive, a cultural space where male protagonists frequently dramatize the romance of departure from the world, from material life, and from women themselves. He cites songs such as ‘Wahan kaun hai tera, musafir, jayega kahaan?’ and ‘Itna na mujhse pyaar badha, ki main ek badal awara,’ which crystallize the masculine fantasy of drifting free from the constraints of relationality. In sharp contrast, a woman’s desire to step beyond prescribed boundaries is portrayed as morally perilous. She must protect her respectability even in expressing love. A song like ‘Mora gora ang lai le, mohe Shyam rang dai de’ illustrates this tension, signalling her need to adopt an acceptable moral guise so that her actions are not interpreted as transgressive.
The essay by Geeta Patel foregrounds the volume’s central preoccupations with trauma, memory, and the precarious search for belonging. Patel frames trauma not as an isolated rupture but as something that takes root in the most ordinary gestures of daily life—‘sliding in so it becomes everyday’. In these banal habits, she suggests, reside stories sedimented in the body, memories ‘seeded in the flesh’. Trauma, for Patel, is sustained through allegory: a space where one can both remain and depart, remember and disavow, inhabit and escape. It is in this allegorical terrain that the contradictory impulses of staying and leaving become legible.
The motifs of gender, agency, and narrative reclamation are taken up in another essay, Sabyn Javeri’s ‘Leaving that Good Girl Behind’, which interrogates both women’s place and their conspicuous absence in the literary canon. Contemplating the erasure of Urdu women writers within a tradition dominated by figures such as Ghalib and Manto, Javeri turns to the task of reimagining foundational myths. She proposes reading Sita as honoured for courage and integrity, and Medusa as a feminist icon that exposes the injustice of victim blaming. Feminism, she argues, offers the interpretive space in which such re-readings become possible.
Javeri revisits her earlier work Hijabistan to contest the idea that agency is a costume Muslim women can don when given the ‘right’ narrative. She argues that fear, once embodied, is difficult to erase, and she traces stories of women who reject not only marriages, nations, or cities but also the myths that have long governed their lives.
The anthology also includes a reflective contribution from Stephen Alter, a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and literature for younger readers. Alter juxtaposes the world of his missionary grandparents with the contemporary realities of Kashmir and Punjab, tracing how these regions have been transformed across generations. He recalls the formidable challenges his grandparents faced, including cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and malaria, conditions that contrast sharply with the socio-political complexities of present-day Kashmir. One of the most striking aspects of his essay is the reference to the apocryphal tale of Jesus of Nazareth’s visit to Kashmir, a story he describes as ‘perhaps the most bewildering’. Alter’s writing unfolds as an elegiac tribute to the landscape of Kashmir and to the deep emotional ties that bind him to it. Kashmir appears not only as a geographical location but also as an imaginative and affective space, a place to which he repeatedly returns and from which he continually departs. This tension between return and leave shapes his meditation on place and belonging. The land’s pull endures, influencing his sensibility through moments of both presence and absence.
The anthology has a resonant memoir by its editor Ritu Menon whose scholarship and activism have long illuminated the intersections of gender, religion, violence, and conflict. A pioneer of feminist publishing in India, she co-founded Kali for Women with Urvashi Butalia in 1984 and later established Women Unlimited, both vital platforms for recovering and disseminating women’s narratives.
In this anthology, Menon offers an intimate portrait of Delhi across shifting historical moments, from the fading vestiges of colonial rule to the Licence Raj and the gradual turn toward liberalization. Her essay becomes a cartography of the city’s evolving neighbourhoods, including Lajpat Nagar, Connaught Place, Mehr Chand and Khanna Market, each depicted with a keen sensitivity to the textures of everyday life. She traces the journeys of families moving from Lahore to Delhi through Purana Qila. Small details like switching to a new jeweller or catching a familiar neighbourhood scent, summon the memory of pre-Partition homes and the emotional geographies carried within them.
Through Menon’s perspective, we also glimpse the vibrant bookstore culture of colonial Connaught Place, from ED Galgotia for popular fiction to Ramakrishna & Sons for more serious titles and Roopchand for discerning readers, all of which reveal a city where literary life animated the public imagination. Her prose treats Delhi as an inherited emotional world now receding from view, rendered through domestic vignettes rather than grand history. She evokes visits to an aunt in a Scindia House flat, excursions to Banaras Art House to help her mother choose a sari, and tentative purchases at Cottage Emporium; such scenes distil the city’s quotidian intimacies. Manjula Narayan’s work performs a similar function, preserving layered urban memories that official histories have all but obscured.
The anthology, taken as a whole, becomes a meditation on the many registers of leave-taking, whether emotional, corporeal, linguistic, or spatial. It examines departures from childhood, from the city, from familiar selves, and even from the body itself, presenting leaving not as a singular event but as an enduring condition of human experience. The volume mourns and celebrates in equal measure, demonstrating how leaving becomes woven into the rhythms of everyday life.
Adania Shibli’s account, which first appeared in Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, finds a renewed place in this anthology. Shibli, a Palestinian novelist and critic whose spare and incisive prose traces the entanglements of place, language, and the long aftermath of violence, contributes one of the collection’s most compelling pieces. Recalling the familiar story of the old man and his clock, she uses it not as a retelling but as a lens through which to contemplate the fragile continuities of everyday life in a landscape marked by erasure. The clock, once a simple device for catching trains, evokes a time when ordinary routines still shaped Palestinian life.
The anthology’s thematic breadth is further expanded by contributions from writers such as Aamer Hussein, Arundhati Subramaniam, Ranjit Hoskote, Bulbul Sharma, Anita Anand, Chaitanya Kalbag, Kshama Kaul and Gagan Gill, whose diverse voices collectively underscore the volume’s richness in range.
Together, they draw the reader into a finely-textured exploration of leave-taking across emotional, political, linguistic, and existential dimensions. In doing so, they affirm the anthology as a significant and resonant contribution to contemporary literary and cultural discourse.
The volume invites readers to consider leaving not as a single rupture but as an ongoing negotiation with time, memory, and the self. It reflects on how people remember, endure, and narrate loss, and how these practices shift across different social and linguistic contexts. Several of the narrations are reprinted from their original publications, and their integration broadens the volume’s scope while giving its thematic architecture greater depth and coherence. The book concludes with full acknowledgements of these earlier sources. In tracing these varied experiences of leave-taking, A Stone Thrown in a Pond offers a measured and affecting meditation on memory, affect, and subjectivity, and merits inclusion in both scholarly and pedagogical conversations.
Sabah Hussain teaches at the Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion, Jamia Millia Islamia. Trained as a political scientist, she writes and thinks across gender, identity, elections, cinema, political theory, and critical thought. Her work has previously taken her to the Department of Political Science, Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, Delhi.