Banu Mushtaq’s Award-Winning ‘Heart Lamp’ Hums With Centuries of Secrets and Quiet Rebellions

Banu Mushtaq (born 3 April 1948) is an Indian Kannada-language writer, activist, and lawyer from Karnataka. For decades, she has confronted fundamentalism and social injustice, enduring, at one point, a months-long social boycott of her family due to her outspoken advocacy for Muslim women’s right to enter mosques. At just eight years old, Mushtaq mastered Kannada in record time at a missionary school in Shivamogga. By twenty-nine, a new mother struggling with postpartum depression, she found her true voice when her husband gave her a blank notebook and a pen and asked her to write. She burst into tears, but those tears welled up into an ocean around her, and she poured out the anguish of those overlooked by society into what would become a body of work culminating in this moving short story collection.

“Heart Lamp,” her first book translated into English (by Deepa Bhasthi), won the 2025 International Booker Prize—making Mushtaq the first Kannada-language author ever nominated and the first short story collection ever to win the prize. This slender volume hums with centuries of secrets and quiet rebellions, gathering twelve stories drawn from her six collections published between 1990 and 2023.

I waited three weeks for this book, reserving it at every Barnes & Noble and scribbling my name on library hold lists like a prayer. Last week, my daughter found “Heart Lamp” for me on Audible, which feels like fate: not just words on a page, but a hush whispered into my ear, slipping between wakefulness and dream like dust drifting through a single shaft of light. The narrator’s voice evokes the weary, sing-song cadence of Muslim women I once cared for as a doctor in Rajasthan—women who carry pain deep in their bones yet wrap grief tenderly in lullabies for their numerous children.

Piercing and Pulsating

Mushtaq’s writing is piercing, her symbols layered and pulsating. Crows appear not just as birds but as shadows of old grief, perched on rafters and murmured about in whispered stories. A darkness permeates a woman’s being when, without explanation, her husband forces her pregnant feet into tiny high heels—fragile shoes, most uncomfortable for a body swollen with life. Then he leaves her to find her way home, as she, dazed and confused, totters down cracked lanes clutching a strange man’s sleeve that holds her up but never quite enough. When her center of gravity rebels, she shatters those shoes because the life inside her is heavier than any beauty standard he can impose.

The narrative returns to two brothers inheriting their parents’ house. The younger seeks to cleanse history—applying fresh paint to the walls and white marble to the floors to welcome his brother and sister-in-law returning from Saudi Arabia. The older can only watch as the ancient mango tree falls beneath the axe—its shade, its fruit, the soft press of his mother’s palm pushing sweetness into his small hands while he perches on a low branch, surfeit with love.

Mushtaq’s prose is rebellious, sharp, yet tender. The economy of her narrative belies its emotional depth. Her imagery is vivid, arresting, and often startling.

And then there is young Abid, painstakingly sifting sharp stones from the dirt so he can press it smooth and gently pack it over a girl’s split forehead, sealing her cut with the earth’s cool hush. But those same hands harbor cruelty: Abid catches a sparrow, its heart hammering in his palm, then slices its neck clean. He presses his fingers into the bird’s warm body, working the cloaca until he retrieves tiny grey eggs. He holds them cupped in his hands like a promise he does not know how to keep.

Children invent games by climbing guava trees, daring each other to catch sparrows among the branches, their laughter weaving with rustling leaves. They swim wild and free in the village pond beneath a sun too bright for such fleeting innocence. After a swim, a young boy presses a gentle kiss to a girl’s cheek before lifting her and laying her on a rock. On her birthday, a child withers beneath invisible sorrows, her spirit shrinking like the peanuts buried deep in scorched earth, waiting for a chance to bloom.

And there are the husbands — one who once dreamed of building a Taj Mahal for his wife, a marble testament to devotion. But when she dies delivering their tenth child to a world undeserving of her, the dream crumbles like plaster. He folds that loss away under the guise of caring for their brood. Another who wove jasmine chains for his wife Naseema’s hair and professed his love under every breath changes like a chameleon to bed an eighteen-year-old the moment Naseema dies in childbirth, claiming the new wife will care for Naseema’s children. The image of the dead wife’s daughter surrounded by her siblings is hauntingly familiar in the pages of “Heart Lamp.”

A Golden-eyed Nurse

Another wife goes to her parents’ home to plead with them to prevent her husband from taking a second wife—a golden-eyed nurse he met after an appendectomy, whom he never once addresses as “sister.” But she is forced to leave because of social pressures. Her mother watches her sadly from a window, her sisters peek from behind curtains, and her sisters-in-law have neither the time nor the inclination to watch her retreating figure. Her ego bruised, her hopes dashed in the face of her lion-hearted brothers, she douses herself in kerosene—only to be dissuaded by another helpless daughter.

Again, those cruel high heels: he demands she wear them because he covets how they look on his sister-in-law’s ankles—a fantasy of an angel stepping across his outstretched hands. But those same sandals become her weapon when she lifts her foot and crushes them flat—heels sharper than any blade.

These are not merely stories. They are entire lifetimes caught in a crow’s cry at dawn, a mango resting sticky in a child’s palm, rice boiling over while women slip barefoot through narrow corridors—careful not to wake the sleeping men who dream while they toil. Somewhere in these pages, a little girl chooses a white dress that does not fit because it has a pocket—just big enough to hide a marble, a sweet, a secret. Another young girl falls from her mother’s hands in the Masjid, her fever finally abating when the breath leaves her body. She is wrapped in a red shroud and buried by the keepers of religion. Her mother’s quiet sobs echo off the cool stone, but the men outside do not hear. The women pass on silent feet, careful as ever not to wake them.

There is a granddaughter who turns up her nose at home-cooked rice and Ovaltine but devours warm bread and sips bitter coffee because of their novelty, spurning the tailored frock with rose petals stitched at the hem for her birthday for a strangely lopsided white dress that does not fit—but she wears it because it has a pocket. A pocket just big enough to hide a marble, a sweet, a secret. A bidi-smoking ajji flicks ash on the doorstep and mutters, “Our hearts must stay pure (even when our bones break).”

“Heart Lamp” is not comfort reading. It does not soothe you back to sleep. It glows with stubborn, pulsing defiance, like a story murmured by a mother about Hatamtai’s daughter so her son’s hunger is satisfied by a few spoons of rice behind a kitchen door. We can all relate to the magic of dust motes dancing in rainbow colors in a sunbeam no broom can sweep away. We can all imagine the hush of women who slip barefoot through cracks in a world pretending not to see them.

Mushtaq’s prose is rebellious, sharp, yet tender. The economy of her narrative belies its emotional depth. Her imagery is vivid, arresting, and often startling. She transforms the mundane into the esoteric. Her stories are culled from the lives of ordinary women who endure like beasts of burden, fighting everyday wars of existence. They shine because of their humanity: bright testaments to tenderness rising from dirt and blood, to small grey eggs that might yet hatch into something better, but often remain unhatched as streaks running down a girl’s dress. The gash on her forehead is soothed by a lump of clay pressed gently against a bleeding cut, her empty stomach delighting in her grandmother’s hidden store of groundnuts. These are stories of the hard mercy that endures when nothing else will.

My favorite story is about Bidadi, who toils tirelessly for her household but falls into utter despair when young Azeem cleans his cycle with her prayer cloth. Despite coaxing from Shamim Bano and her family, she cannot stop weeping. You will laugh out loud when you learn how the devout Bidadi is consoled by a sip of a special drink: ”aabe-kausa” and how the poor perpetrator of the innocent crime must provide the drink for her every day.

Mushtaq’s stories remind me of folk tales written by O. Henry and Munshi Premchand, and of Vermeer’s paintings of ordinary people. Like “The Girl with a Pearl Earring,” they glow. They are strange and invite us into a surreal world so different from ours. That is Banu Mushtaq’s artistry.

And in this “Heart Lamp,” the light keeps burning.

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With one foot in Huntsville, Alabama, the other in her birth home, India, and a heart steeped in humanity, Monita Soni writes as a contemplative practice. She has published hundreds of poems, movie reviews, book critiques, and essays, and contributed to combined literary works. Her two books are My Light Reflections and Flow Through My Heart. You can hear her commentaries on Sundial Writers Corner, WLRH 89.3 FM.