Book Review: Where Mayflies Live Forever
1 min read
Paromita Goswami reviews Anupama Mohan’s debut novel Where Mayflies Live Forever (Published by Picador India) observing how the book haunts us long after the last line is read and enables us to look beyond criminal liability.
- ISBN: 978-9390742530
- Publisher: Picador India
- Pages: 208
- Price: Rs.599
Anupama Mohan’s debut novel Where Mayflies Live Forever (hereafter Mayflies) opens with a question, “What can I say that might even scratch the surface of who she was?” The identity of the protagonist – who she really is – lies at the core of this novel. Written powerfully in a confluence of poetry and prose, it leaves the reader heartbroken, angry, disturbed even terrified, and yet at the end of it all deeply uplifted.
Family and friends offer their testimonies to the police and we learn that Veni is a gang rape survivor who is denied justice and whose younger brother is brutalized by the rapist. She puts an end to the savagery of the antagonist Senganoor Adhiban by killing and decapitating him in a marketplace – the most public of all places – and walking down the street with his head. She burns her hair and clothes after the act and disappears mysteriously.
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