‘An Unrestored Woman’ tells vibrant, raw stories of India, Pakistan

The stories in Shobha Rao’s debut collection, “An Unrestored Woman,” follow the lives of characters caught up in the tumultuous partition of India and Pakistan. The collection opens with a brief historical note on the creation of these separate states in 1947. It’s a short note, but it sets the stage and provides context for the stories that follow.

Rao’s characters run the gamut from heroic to monstrous: a child bride, a murderous spurned servant, a woman caught up in a train robbery, a boy who stops speaking at the age of 8. All of these characters dip in and out of one another’s lives. The narrator of one story often will reappear as a minor character in the next, giving the collection a sense of continuity while still allowing each story to stand on its own.

The stories’ setting range from small rural villages to the extravagant home of a British colonel. They stretch from the partition to contemporary times and often present a vision into a period of horrific violence and everyday depravities. Rao doesn’t shy away from violence. In one scene, a homosexual British constable comes across the body of a man — a person he had secretly loved — beaten to death by a mob.

Rao describes this man’s hair splayed out in the dust and blood, “so dark that he could well imagine diving into its pool at midnight,” recalling an earlier moment where the narrator tenderly imagined this same man’s hair spread across a pillow. Rather than depicting violence as sensational, Rao searches for the innate humanity of the characters.

Her prose is a stunning set of contradictions. Short, simple sentences gives an electrifying punch to the gut, making sections where Rao rises to the heights of lyricism all the more powerful.

She describes a man and woman traveling together on a highway as a spider, a creature of significance to the story’s narrator, as “a mirage of a creature with eight legs. A creature he had perhaps known long ago, one that was scented like dusk, and whose eyes had gleamed like the Gomti [river].”

As vibrant and raw as Rao’s depictions of a bygone era are, the stories set in modern times also stand out. Through her characters, Rao delves into greater psychological complexity.

This story was originally published March 26, 2016 at 4:30 AM with the headline "‘An Unrestored Woman’ tells vibrant, raw stories of India, Pakistan."