Description

Twelve of India’s most exciting women writers — across twelve languages, twelve cities, and twelve generations of inheritance — bring you a single, fierce question: *what does a woman burn when she finally stops being good?*

In Geetanjali Reddy’s opening story, a Hyderabad housewife begins, very quietly, to set fire to one of her husband’s shirts every Sunday. In Mehrunissa Jaffer’s *The Kashmir Wedding*, a bride realises on her mehendi night that the groom is not the man she met. In Rituparna Das’s devastating *Calcutta, August*, a daughter cleans her dead mother’s almirah and finds a love letter, in Bengali, addressed to a woman. And in the title story by Lavanya Iyer, a quiet South Indian schoolteacher discovers, at forty-eight, that fury is its own form of grace.

Translated where needed from Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Urdu, Marathi, and Kannada, *Aurat aur Aag* gathers stories of mothers, mistresses, daughters, widows, runaways, and revolutionaries. Some are tender. Some are sharp enough to draw blood. All of them refuse, in their separate beautiful ways, the polite Indian fiction that women’s lives are quiet things.

An anthology to be read slowly, passed around, and argued about — *Aurat aur Aag* is a portrait of contemporary Indian womanhood at its most unguarded.

*Featuring stories by Geetanjali Reddy, Mehrunissa Jaffer, Rituparna Das, Lavanya Iyer, Komal Bhardwaj, Tasneem Sayyed, Priyamvada Nair, Anjali Singh Solanki, Farah Imam, Devasena Krishnamurthy, Shalini Bose, and Nilanjana Roychoudhury.*