These Tongues That Grow Roots by Sucharita Dutta-Asane, published by Dhauli Books, is a collection of 15 stories that resists the allure of conventional storytelling, crafting instead a meditative exploration of memory, violence, and the quiet resonances of human experience. At 168 pages, it offers a compact yet profound journey through narratives that reflect on pervasiveness of violence, loss and longing, indicated by beginning and ending the collection with war stories: “War 1” and “War 2”; a structure that suggests an unending cycle of conflict, both external and internal.

Dutta-Asane's narratives are not driven by plot but by reflection, inviting the reader to engage actively with the text. The opening story, set in the Naxal times of Calcutta, introduces a recurring theme – violence and its aftermath. In “Wind, Woman, River,” the wind becomes a narrator, embodying the fragmented memories of Partition. This motif of memory recurs throughout, facilitating an exploration of themes such as loss, grief, and the resultant perplexities, but also often examining the very act of remembering itself and its inherent struggles. The stories oscillate between the deeply personal and the unsettlingly political, rendering the past and present inseparable.

Each tale unfolds in a space of “nowhereness,” as Randhir Khare...