Heart Lamp

Banu Mushtaq's 12 stories, written in Kannada between 1990 and 2023, chronicle the lives of Muslim women and girls in patriarchal communities across southern India. The collection moves through a young bride navigating a hostile mother-in-law, a widow asserting financial independence against her sons, a girl resisting an arranged marriage, and a mother grieving a child lost to communal violence. Deepa Bhasthi's English translation preserves the multilingual texture of Mushtaq's Kannada, refusing to flatten the Urdu, Arabic, and English words Muslim women in Karnataka use every day.