The collection Heart Lamp: Selected Stories has riches, and some repetitive moments. That said, it is undeniably one of the very few examples of its kind, available in English. Like the Tamil writer Salma, Banu Mushtaq takes us to a different geography and gives us a linguistically heterogeneous, domestic world of Muslim men and women — markedly different from the North Indian fare of an Attia Hosain or Khadija Mastoor. However, my thoughts today are not so much about the original but the translation, and it involves not a comparison with the original (for I can’t read Kannada) but how it comes over to us. In other words, how do I read this text as a non-Kannadiga woman reader/translator and respond from that twin-ness. This is also to foreground the translator’s role who, unlike many translators has been rewarded, but like most translators, not engaged with.

When you open the book, you move directly into the first story. There is no introduction to the writer, or the translator’s note — the opening paragraph in Deepa Bhasthi’s translation makes a luminous start — the long sentence is done sharply, going from the “concrete jungle” through “people, people, people” and ending with the introduction of Mujahid. The voice is that of Zeenat (“Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal”) who then tells us how absurdly few choices there are for educated and intelligent women to introduce husbands. Mushtaq’s comment on the limited language of kinship and intimacy and its repeated failure to........

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