Banu Mushtaq has been peering into the homes of Muslim women in Southern India her entire life, and she doesn’t like what she sees. Husbands return from work angry, women are beaten, and children fight over food. These scenes populate Mushtaq’s short story collection, Heart Lamp. The stories have been selected from Mushtaq’s vast oeuvre and been translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi to critical acclaim: winning the English PEN and landing a spot on this year’s International Booker longlist are only a few of its honours.

Across Heart Lamp‘s twelve stories, “Black Cobras” and the closing story, “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!”are particularly striking. In “Black Cobras”, a poor mother, Aashraf, turns to the “mutawalli”—a kind of village and religious custodian—to secure money, food, and medicine for her sick children. Aashraf’s husband had, without warning, abandoned his family and found a younger wife with whom he intended to start a new family. The mutawalli, chummy with the absentee husband, doesn’t care to hear Aashraf’s complaints or the alimony petition she struggled to craft. And so, Aashraf resorts to sitting outside the mosque with her children, in a powerful demand for attention. As she faces an onslaught of abuse—verbal and physical—her mind rests on the rage the village feels towards her while offering a kinder view of her husband:

The past does not rise up to dance in public. The present does not touch him. The future doesn’t move him, nor is it a mystery.

The end of Aashraf’s story is similar to the rest of the women in Heart Lamp: intentional cruelty and social and institutional apathy.

Yet as Aashraf and her children, small and grieving, fade into the background, the women of the village gather like cobras around the mutawalli, subtly subverting the stature of obedience imposed on them. As he walks through town, a woman throws a stone toward the mutawalli, pretending that there’s a dog nearby while muttering, “A dog, just a dog!” Another woman screams out into the distance, “Nothing good will come your way … may black cobras coil themselves around you”, satisfied with her curses that landed like “dynamite”. The women are too plentiful to reprimand, and they haven’t technically done anything wrong. These are small victories, but they wound the mutawalli nonetheless. “Black Cobras” encapsulates all the themes Mushtaq covers best: the cruelty of men, the oppression of the traditional village structure, and the powerful rage of women united.

The final story, “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!” serves as an apt closing ribbon for the collection. Written like a letter addressed to Allah, a woman taunts and dares God to try and survive as a woman before cutting him down to size: “You are just a detached director.” The implications are clear: in the play of life he’s created, either God is too stupid to understand what women endure, or he’s too cruel to care. It’s a daring piece, impactful in isolation yet made grander by the stories that preceded it.

Banu Mushtaq’s life and work—as an advocate, activist, and writer—is a spectacular and dizzying array of achievements. Yet in its thematic and stylistic repetition, Heart Lamp can, despite the collection’s individual successes, prove a bit lukewarm, if not monotonous. While the emotional punch of a woman suffering under the hand of an abusive husband is a story that never grows old, the stories in the collection follows the same plotline of abuse — down to the actions of men and reactions of women — even in stories sandwiched next to each other, so similar in fact that they spark a dull memory of something read thirty pages before.

The critical acclaim of Heart Lamp is deserved; Mushtaq is—and has been for decades—a writer with a noticeably powerful and profound voice. The potential recognition of her stories through the Bhasthi’s translation of Heart Lamp will introduce her stories, already beloved in Kannada, to a wider and diversified audience. One only wishes the collection that earned her international fame was tighter and cleaner to accurately reflect Mushtaq’s talent.

Mahika Dhar is a writer, essayist, and book reviewer based in New Delhi. She is the creator of bookcrumbs and her short stories have appeared in Seaglass Literary, Through Lines and Minimag among others.