Nisha da Cunha is widely regarded as one of India’s finest short story writers. In this first volume of her collected stories, which includes five new stories, we see her at her best, writing with a sure touch and a fine degree of sensitivity about women faced with uncertainty, fear, despair and romantic longing. She uses a number of female voices–each one authentic, credible and compelling-to bring into sharp focus the inner lives and feelings of her characters as they try to come to terms with separation, rejection, loss and death. There is Safia in the title story, who grapples with grief and isolation in the big city after she is transplanted from the idyllic village where she grew up in the company of her beloved father and birds; Radha in ‘Old Cypress’, whose husband of twenty-nine years leaves her for a younger woman; and El in ‘African Bird’, who shares the confusion of her male parrot when he lays three eggs even as she tries to cope with the loss of a limb. We are also witness to the growing and difficult friendship of a cantankerous old man and a middle-aged woman who are drawn together by their passion for books; and obsessive love of a matriarch that makes her son an emotional cripple; and the unnatural calm of a mother whose worst premonition has come true. A collection of considerable beauty and power, including stories from the critically acclaimed Old Cypress and The Permanence of Grief, this volume is infused with Nisha da Cunha’s deep understanding of the fragility of the human condition.
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