“Oh! Even this rain does not soak men, and is behaving so softly, with great respect. She was surprised even in that moment,” observes Aashraf in “Black Cobras,” one of the most devastating stories of Banu Mushtaq’s 2025 International Booker-prize winning collection Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, where a mother with her sick infant stands shivering before her bigamist husband and an indifferent maulvi who, instead of imparting justice as he is supposed to, is belching off the biryani he has been bribed with. That poignant moment, with Aashraf standing and holding her child, three or fours steps below the men, getting soaked by hard-hitting, moisture-heavy breeze, despite being under a roof shelter at the entrance of a mosque, illustrates the social and gender inequality that beats as the heart of this collection.

Even in her most pitiful moment, Aashraf is able to feel surprised by how nature sides with these cruel men and in a place where God is supposedly watching, no less. This points to the futility of her protest and the entrapment of her position as a mother and wife. This moment crystalizes Mushtaq’s personal investment in the topic—as an activist raised in Hassan, Karnataka, she has spent years championing women’s rights against gender and religious oppression. This scene symbolizes that at times when law does not hold, all that’s left to be done is to light a lamp of hope and voice these stories aloud, or else (like Aashraf and many others) become a victim yourself.

Almost as though the protester in Mushtaq urged the author to voice these injustices aloud, her writing creates a rich spoken texture and uses colloquial humor and rhythms of oral storytelling traditions to bring the prose alive. Heart Lamp could have taken the form of a long, formal treatise on Muslim and Dalit women in southern India, informed as it is by Mushtaq’s years as a lawyer and journalist. Instead, she opted for a style that’s deceptively simple, recreating not only systemic injustices but unforgettable, real-life characters. Among them are first-born girls who raise their siblings, beedi-smoking eccentric grandmothers, skeptical wives of greedy Muslim clergymen, and a range of mothers—loving mothers who don’t view their offspring through a gendered lens; who braid kisses in their daughter’s long black hair before parting; who are ready to tie the knot with a stranger just so their son can retain peace in his household.

While these women and stories did not strike me, an Indian woman who grew up around similar characters, as unconventional, Mushtaq’s collection uses courage, compassion, and comic relief to stand apart from what one might expect. It can be hard to imagine humor when dealing with plight of women in orthodox Muslim communities, but Mushtaq surprises readers with Austenesque irony in the narrative’s most difficult moments. In “Fire Rain,” another story, Mushtaq stunningly observes how a buffoonish Muslim clergyman twists religious doctrine, just so he can weasel out of sharing his family’s endowments with his sisters. His henchman starts a rumor that the town drunk, who had died on their watch, has been buried in the Hindu cremation ground, which takes priority over all other more meaningful issues, even in the minds of the maulvi’s sisters who until that moment were fighting for their birthright because they are living in piteous squalor. “Enthusiasm grew for fighting the holy war to save Islam,” Mushtaq observes with dry wit and humor to show how the cunning clergyman rounds up supporters to meet the District Commissioner to exhume the “martyr’s” body.

“But still, mutawalli sahib, soil is same everywhere, isn’t it? What is the difference in soil?” remarks the District Commissioner tongue-in-cheek to the clergyman, foreshadowing that all is not well with the dead body, leading to its promised dramedy in the unexpected ending. “Fire Rain” subtly communicates, which Deepa Bhasthi terms in her translator’s note as Mushtaq’s deep conviction in the “personal-is-the-political”—a belief that she grew up on in the 70s and the 80s in India. Mushtaq writes in Kannada, the mother tongue of her state Karnataka, though Bhasthi’s translator’s note analyzes her spoken-style Dakhini Urdu to be an inventive intermingling of Persian, Dehlavi, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu. She describes Mushtaq’s style as “code-switching” between these sister dialects, which to me, as a bilingual reader, seems like picking the exact word-choice from an array of dialects to express the emotions of the moment, skillfully capturing the character’s movement between satire and deep sorrow, and from rage to compassion. This multilingualism combined with the universal plurality of human themes like motherhood, loss, resilience, and hope, transcends Heart Lamp from a label of “minority stories,” and gives the collection its broader range and scope.