Love in a Lauki: Review of Abha Iyengar’s “The Gourd Seller & Other Stories”
Soumya Mukherjee reviews the book in The Hindustan Times
The most marvelous stories of our lives are often hidden in the mundane. This collection of seven short stories is about the small-big things that make or break our lives — a gourd seller who heals an embittered woman with the lightness and warmth that he wraps in the vegetable, a girl brought to terms with the ugliness of beauty right in her family, a housekeeper who pays the price of sitting on the high stool, and many more.
The writing is simple and strikes as poignant while bringing out what lies beneath the obvious details that make for seemingly ordinary lives. From the Ghalib library to shanties in Kanpur, it makes you travel not just out, but deep within. Some of the morbid endings are as moving, and these stories stay on.
