Banu Mushtaq wrote Heart Lamp for 33 years. Now, it’s nominated for the International Booker Prize

The rebellious writer has blazed a path in a rural Muslim community that most do not understand. She attended university when most of her peers were tying the knot in their teens, married for love at 26, became a reporter for the award-winning vernacular paper Lankesh Patrike, then an activist in several protest literary circles including Bandaya Sahitya and eventually an advocate; not to miss her two terms in the municipal council. The daunting prospect of owning her writerly voice only came to her through a crisis.

Upon graduating, Mushtaq was ready to embark on her journey to teach, explore and write. But it was marriage that came tumbling down on her dreams like a ton of bricks. “I had always wanted to write but had nothing to write because suddenly, after a love marriage, I was told to wear a burqa and dedicate myself to domestic work. I became a mother suffering from postpartum depression at 29.”

Finding marriage, motherhood and domesticity against the very fibre of her being, Mushtaq chose a radical solution. “One day, I doused myself with white petrol kept in a can at home to clean watches since my in-laws had a watch-cum-spectacle shop,” she recalls. “With a matchbox in my hand and ready to strike, it was my husband, who I had married for love, who clung to me and kept our three-month-old daughter at my feet, telling me to stop.”

In ‘Heart Lamp’, the eponymous short story, Banu Mushtaq concludes the incident much more poetically for Mehrun, who, drenched in kerosene, is interrupted by her adolescent daughter and the baby placed on the floor. “She picked up the baby and pulled Salma, her young daughter, to her chest, feeling as if she was being comforted, touched and understood by a friend. All she could say was ‘Forgive me, my darling.’”

Heart Lamp, published by Penguin Random House India