In whom can women really put their faith?

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, Banu Mushtaq's stories are full of dark humour and unpredictable pain

- Poorna Swami

What is a wife to her husband? How should she describe him? Maybe he is her "home person"; but he is the one who leaves every day, while she stays at home. Is he her "yajamana" then, her owner, and she a servant with a degree? Banu Mushtaq's short story collection Heart Lamp opens with this scorching exercise in definitions. Zeenat, a recently married woman, tries to find the right word to describe her new life with a man in a town where she has no friends. When the newlyweds are invited to the home of an older couple, Zeenat finds a companion in the woman of the house, Shaista. They drink tea and lament the struggle to educate daughters in a culture that reserves its money for sons.

During this same afternoon, the women and their husbands stumble into a conversation about love. Shaista's husband declares that if he were an emperor, he'd have built her a palace that would put the Taj Mahal to shame. Zeenat's husband, though, is dismissive. To him, the Taj Mahal is no more than a grave, an apologia from an emperor who had countless other women at his disposal. But Zeenat quietly wishes her husband, too, would shower her with a love as passionate as the one she believes Shaista receives.

Towards the end of the story, Shaista dies unexpectedly after childbirth. Her husband doesn't build her a Taj Mahal. Instead, he marries another woman. "I need someone to look after the children," he tells Zeenat, who runs out of the building, distraught.