Sometimes life’s smallest moments can carry the biggest lessons. On a routine evening walk a few years ago, a simple run-in with a scorpion taught me about restraint, mercy, and the power of choosing kindness over retaliation.
This poem reflects on that moment, and the ripple effect that can follow when we hold back our sharpest stings.
Dear Scorpion
Evening is the best time to walk, the sun retires from scorching; my shirt feels a little less sticky. My dog scuffs along, sniffing, his own form of social media. I scuff along in my well-worn chappals, not the wisest choice, scrolling through my phone.
The evening in question melted over the sky, hardening into oranges, purples, and blues. Scuff, scuff. Sniff sniff, scroll. When something cold and hard rolled over the soft, sensitive flesh of my foot.
My brain tried to place the feeling: A beetle? A plastic toy? A bottle? I looked down. My heart melted, warm liquid, draining to my toes.
A scorpion stood with its stinger raised. Ready to duel if it met my foot again, in the dead leaves covering our path. Do I run or stand my ground? Both felt wrong.
So we stood for hours, seconds, really. The harder I stared, the more it looked offended than armed.
I chose to back away, my eyes on the insulted creature, shrinking as I retreated until it vanished.
It had every right to strike me with its poison. I felt that path was my own.
But it chose not to sting me. The opportunity was easy. Maybe it was luck, or maybe it sensed my fear like its own. Or maybe it wasn’t in the mood.
Dear scorpion, I learned something on that evening walk. I can choose not to sting another. Swallow the bitterness that would rush through blue capillaries, red arteries, straight to another’s heart.
I can fade into the twilight, but still stand guard. Maybe their venom will return to where it began, softening the next hardened heart, one restrained sting at a time.
Dear scorpion, if mercy flows this way, through veins and capillaries, into oranges, purples, and blues, maybe this world needn’t sting so deep.
A Note: I hope this poem encourages you to pause and choose mercy in your own daily encounters, softening hardened hearts one restrained sting at a time.
Somewhere between arrival and departure, I’ve learned to speak in two voices and carry two selves. This is about what happens when neither feels entirely mine.
A Switch | സ്വിച്ച്
This plane window is a signaller. Ready to help me choose myself before we fall to the earth. I am sinking and floating at once, but I look out the window anyway to see which personality to wear after landing.
Grey bypasses, skyscrapers, concrete squares: all holding their breath. The switch flips to America.
A quilt of coconut palms, low white buildings, the switch flips to India. My head wobbles before the plane touches down.
Later, I learned there’s a word for this. I protested: I don’t do this. Not me. And the man I spoke to replied, “Oh, but I think you do.”
In India, I’m more reserved, yet I speak more. Slowly. Enunciating. I use words like: lift – boot – lorry – brinjal – petrol. I say Ruh-vi, not Raaah-vi. I roll my Rs and move na – nja – nna through my tongue and lips. I clench my fists in frustration when the word is right there, drifting, italicized, in my mind, tucked under my tongue when I try to speak.
And then in America, when I’m with people who knew me once, but not quite. When nostalgia rolls in as thick as the fleece blanket that keeps me warm in stark Pennsylvania winds, I’m more open, but speak less. I speak quickly, slurring my words: “Didja eat yet?” I smile hellos and how are yous to perfect strangers, but never pushing beneath: “Friend, how is your heart?” or “Is your father doing okay?”
“You kinda have an accent now,” so I flatten my As again. My voice shifts north into my nose and the words roll out: elevator – trunk – truck – eggplant – gas.
I don’t have to worry about chechis and chettans. Americans like first names, giving us a pretend closeness, like a handshake without eye contact.
Here’s the thing: neither one feels quite right. In India, I wear a mask. I smile when I don’t want to; swallow questions and bite back criticisms because my face marks me a visitor even though I’ve rooted my hands deep in the soil. In America, I wear a wool sweater two sizes too small. I tug at the sleeves, sweating, itchy, chafed but never take it off.
So, who am I? Am I the words spoken to others, what they see: a woman in love, a fool, a brave soul? Or am I something deeper? Or am I none of these?
Am I just a middle-aged woman afraid she will always be brushing the edges, never quite let inside? Am I just afraid that someday I’ll be a stranger in a strange land where I borrowed books from the library and licked ice cream as I walked to the park?
Now, the only home is my daughter’s voice when she tells me the song she and her friends made up; when my husband and I walk into the hovering emerald canopies.
If my skin were peeled away and my chest cracked open: The hush of the monsoon rain washing through the ghats, the whisper of the snow covering the evergreens—
Would you recognize the language of my pulse,
the accent of my blood,
forever stuttering switching tracks until I break the lever.
Heart Lamp is a tender, unflinching collection of stories about Muslim women in Karnataka, mothers, brides, housekeepers, whose quiet lives burn with the fire of the sun.
The translation avoids italics and footnotes, letting readers step fully into these worlds without exoticizing them.
Read if you’re drawn to fiction that sits in your heart long after the final page.
Meet Banu Mushtaq
I ordered Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp before I even knew what it was about. On my Facebook feed, I’d come across a post celebrating her Booker Prize win for this collection of short stories. What drew me in was that her stories had been translated from Kannada, a South Indian language rarely seen on global literary stages. And when I read her acceptance speech quote, “No story is ever small,” I was hooked, long before I cracked the spine of the paperback
But I soon learned that before turning to fiction, Mushtaq had worked as an activist and journalist, advocating for the rights of Muslim women in Karnataka and beyond. The stories in Heart Lamp reflect what she witnessed and heard during that time in her career.
Universal Threads
Stitching together the everyday lives of Muslim women, Mushtaq accomplishes her mission: she takes the personal and makes it political. Each selected tale reveals what it means to be a woman, not only within the homes and streets of her stories, but also within the larger currents of a global reality. Though several terms (“jama’at,” “kafan,” “seragu,” “mutawalli,” among others) were unfamiliar to me, Mushtaq writes with such intimacy that definitions feel unnecessary; the emotions of her characters go beyond language.
For example, in “Black Cobras,” much of the action unfolds within the walls of a mosque, with references to Quranic rules I know little about. Yet the desperation of Aashraf, a mother staging a sit-in protest, is visceral:
“The powdery rain falling relentlessly…had not cooled the fire in her gut… The hunger that was gnawing at her stomach with sharp nails had not weakened her…. hers was a dog’s belly that could be filled somehow or the other…. She was ready to fight for [her children’s] right to live their lives.”
This primal urge to protect her children is recognizable to so many mothers.
And in another story, “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!,” Mushtaq tackles arranged marriage and dowry harassment with equal force. Yet even for those of us untouched by these realities, she writes lines that pierce with familiarity:
“I was on the road to becoming a mother myself but I stood in a corner constantly looking back down the road to my maternal home.”
Who hasn’t, at some point, longed for the comfort of their mother?
A Big “No” to Italics
Beyond the book’s themes questioning patriarchy and traditions (cultural and religious), something I appreciate about it is translator Deepa Bhasthi’s decision not to italicize non-English words or use footnotes to define transliterated terms. After living in a South Indian state for nearly 13 years, I’m acutely aware of English’s chokehold on the world. A book like this, telling stories and struggles of women that feel universal, would have lost some of its immediacy if italics had pulled my mind out of the narrative. While reading, it didn’t matter whether I knew every Kannada or Islamic term; what I felt was the anguish, the numbness, the power in these tales.
I also agree completely with Bhasthi’s statement: “Italics… announce words as imported from another language, exoticising them and keeping them alien to English.” Now, as I reflect on the book, I can look up the words I didn’t know, gaining something new because of her choice.
Even without definitions and italics, Mushtaq’s prose flows with an intimacy that draws the reader inside the minds of these women, or into the homes of their families. Certain images recur across the collection—the heart as a lamp or a toy, hands pressed to walls, the relentless rain and heat—forming threads that stitch these tales into a mourning shroud.
Though her narratives are rooted in Kannada culture and the lives of Muslim women, they never exclude; instead, they open doors for readers to step into unfamiliar worlds. Much of this accessibility is thanks to Bhasthi’s translation, which preserves the original’s cadence and quirks while letting Mushtaq’s political and social undertones ripple outwards.
There’s a restraint to the storytelling, even in moments of despair or rage, that makes the emotional weight hit harder. Mushtaq never shies from truth or harsh reality either: the women who act on their “big-big” feelings in these stories often come from more privileged social and financial backgrounds. Those without such privilege are often forced to stay mute, for whatever repressive reason, but their silence feels no less powerful.
Kinship and Solidarity
Along with this silence, what lingers most after finishing Heart Lamp is not just the stories themselves but the sense of solidarity that flows from the narratives to the reader. Mushtaq gives voice to women who might never otherwise be heard.
Yaseen Bua, the long-suffering housekeeper in “The Shroud,” is a perfect example. Abandoned by her husband, she cleans and cooks for several families, quietly saving for her one dream: her son’s wedding. But as her body begins to fail, she is struck by the inevitability of her own death. With her meager savings, she makes a single request of her employer: to bring back a burial shroud soaked in ZamZam water from Hajj. By the end of this story, we should be pressing palms to our eyes in shame over the selfishness of the privileged and the self-erasure of the marginalized.
Reading these stories felt like both a revelation and a bridge. As someone far removed from these cultural specifics, I kept returning to the universality of Mushtaq’s characters: their pain, their perseverance, their subdued resistance. I was especially moved by a moment when a bride, after pressing her hennaed hands to the western wall of her new home, is suddenly assaulted by the weight of her new life:
“…her sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, their expenses, food, clothing, a mother-in-law who was always sick… Her own dreams withered away.”
In these brief moments, Mushtaq delivers on her claim that “No story is ever small,” reminding us how even the quietest lives can burn with the fire of the sun.
The Weight of Womanhood
Mushtaq’s stories resist simplification. For as many unlikable men that are in this book, there are unlikable wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. The stories are layered with the injustices, compromises, and overall oppression that women endure daily.
Even though many of these stories were written in the early 1990s, they remain painfully relevant today, as seen by the endlessstream of tragicheadlines. As the final story reminds us, the experience of womanhood cannot be understood from a distance. “Come to earth as a woman… Be a woman once, Oh Lord!”
An American in Kerala 