NOT WITHOUT REASON AND OTHER STORIES

A warm humanism marks this collection of stories by Rajee Seth, some of which are vibrantly feminist. Woman suffers and man too and Seth tries to dissect the reasons why. A clinical detachment is tempered by empathy and understanding. The protagonist in Ammas Gold, who lost in an earlier war and wants to sell her ornaments to donate to the National Defence Fund during the Kargil battle, cannot be deterred by her grasping other son. Partition forms the background of Wait, Intezaar Hussein: on Independence Day, a man, while reading a book about the watershed in history, assailed by the memory of his beloved who perished in the Lahore riots forty years ago. In Yatra, an old man getting reconciled to his son after long servitude at his masters mansion discovers that being fettered is demeaning to the human spirit. The title story is about childlessness where the man, himself the cause, stigmatises his wife, who gets wind of her mother-in-laws plans to seek another bride and decides to leave. Morass lends itself to pharaphrasing Ivy Compton-Burnetts words: pride goes before a fall, but male pride may continue after. In Raji Narasimhans precise and vivid translations from their Hindi originals, the stories truly come in. Apart from the general reader, Not without Reason and Other Stories will appeal to students of gender studies and comparative literature.