Onion Curry and the Nine Times Table: The Samyukta Anthology of Malayalam Stories

Onion Curry and the Nine Times Table brings some of the most fascinating contemporary Malayalam stories by women. A struggling single mother listens to her little girl’s urgent and original projects to bring them riches. The arctic landscapes of her childhood reading shift strangely when a woman decides to visit them for herself. Another story describes an ordinary afternoon where nothing really happens—except that dreamscapes resurface with an undertow of remembered pain. The stories possess a fine-grained sense of place—claustrophobic tharavads, forest sounds, the songs of fishermen. Sexual violence is explored in all its complexity—male fears, a girl’s pleasure in her body, recurring encounters with casual abuse, with fiction that does violence to female experience.