The Curse , from its very title, seems to come with a warning. The titles of the stories too inspire a sense of foreboding: “On the Edge,” ...
The Curse, from its very title, seems to come with a warning. The titles of the stories too inspire a sense of foreboding: “On the Edge,” “The Trap,” “The Orbit of Confusion,” and the eponymous story, “The Curse.” If one were to identify Salma, the author of this short story collection, with a particular literary concern, it would be this: women and domestic spaces that are transformed into suffocating epicentres of conflict. After all, The Hour Past Midnight (in Lakshmi Holmstrom’s translation) had gained recognition for the way in which it delved into the mundane darkness of the lives of its protagonists and the domestic spaces they inhabit.
The stories in The Curse, curated and translated by N Kalyan Raman, follow this genealogy. Take, for example, the setting of “Toilets”. Shamim, the protagonist, takes her aunt to the hospital because she has pains in the lower abdomen. The cause, we find out, is because the aunt held in her pee for a long period of time.
As Shamim and her aunt make their way back home, we are introduced to the toilet from Shamim’s youth, or rather, to its inaccessibility. The toilet, set apart from the house, becomes the seat of the women’s strife. They can’t use it...
