‘The Menstrual Coupé’: These experimental stories about women’s lives and sexuality are a revelation

The short story genre for translated Indian fiction is flourishing both in the publisher’s eyes for undiscovered gems and the reader’s growing interest in literature beyond the anglophone world. The Menstrual Coupé by Shahina K Rafiq is one such instance this year. It is a collection of short stories and flash fiction translated by Priya Nair from the Malayalam. This collection dissects the different ways girls and women experience life and act in a world radically opposed to their existence. Set in Kerala, the stories bring to the fore the voices that would otherwise have gone unrecorded,

Strange women, stranger situations

From the very first story, readers get a sense that the collection is anything but a straightforward feminist project of liberating women. Rafiq takes her characters and puts them in strange situations right. In “The Genie”, a woman dreams of a djinn and begins constructing her life around it until she realises that the apparition will always be a step ahead of her. The sixth story, “The Book Release” is of a murderer who attends book releases and kills men for their “trashy” taste in writers. The twenty-four stories in this volume are a revelation. They ensure the reader is entertained while stitching a searing fabric of women caught in patriarchal hangups.

In his foreword, writer Anees Salim says that reading Rafiq’s writing feels like taking “a long walk”. Indeed, she leads you by the hand into a winding labyrinth of dilemmas and consequences of a choice. These dilemmas work well in “The Book” when a man mistakenly divorces his wife and is given the choice to remarry her once she’s married to another man and is divorced again. Every choice a character makes in each of these stories leads to a series of unsettling consequences. In “Half-Cooked”, we see a woman who fails to get pregnant. She barely makes a choice for herself. Her decisions, like her body, remain undercooked, and she lives out the consequences by watching a Tamil film and dreaming of death. The long walk on which the author takes her reader is unpredictable, uneasy enough to disturb the idea of a walk. And yet, the walk is worth taking.

Twenty-four stories in a collection can certainly make a reader wonder if it might tire and lose steam after a point. Rafiq’s collection is able to put that fear aside with its experimental tenor. Take the tenth story “Upside Down” – the prose poem plays with words, themes and images. It takes the idea of writing fiction and its purpose of rewriting life in whatever fashion. It is a love story and yet a story of how love can be written about. The one-page flash fiction pieces are stunning interludes of life in snapshots. The energy in these short pieces compliment structurally to the longer stories.

The stories in this collection peak when they explore sexuality. Raw and visceral, these stories come with a sharp edge that does not sugarcoat a woman’s sexuality. The collection pulses with women who desire in an unabashed fashion not often seen in Indian literature. The author’s handling of a woman’s sexuality while bringing it into conversation with religion, class, gender and age is commendable, and makes me hopeful that writers in India will be more open to such themes.

A woman in a man’s world

Rafiq’s writing is a great companion to another translated short story collection released this year – The Keeper of Desolation by Chandan Pandey, translated from the Hindi by Sayari Debnath. While Pandey’s collection centred on men and explored the place of women from the perspective his male characters, Rafiq’s stories does the opposite. Here the focus are on women and their lives, their accounts providing a sense of where men belong, or, rather, where the woman belongs in the man’s world. Both the collections, however, give a sense of what it is to be alive in contemporary India and the challenges a system poses to individual lives. Read back-to-back, the two books could start a conversation on writing, translation, sexuality, Indian state politics, religious fundamentalism, patriarchy, caste, and a delusional neoliberal India.

The stories that are my favourite from this collection are “Madness”, “My Notebook”, “A Domestic Animal”, “Pulp Romance and the Epilogue”. They work excellently both on the structural and thematic levels. There was intensity to these stories that catapulted beyond the pages. They make one think while imagining a world going haywire. The titular story, “Menstrual Coupé”, is remarkable in its scope. It places a host of women from varying social backgrounds in a train compartment going to their respective destinations in the morning. However, it does make the same impact as its companions. Not only does the story smack of celebratory sentimentalism, but it also essentialises womanhood through the characters’ tales of menstruation. The collection has built too strong a road for itself with its previous twenty-three stories to provide a sugarcoated ending.

This collection is yet another example of why not only the world but also Indian readers should read fiction from beyond the anglophone world. Using local myths, narratives, geo-local allusions, and ways of thinking, Rafiq’s work in Nair’s translation gives readers a look into the jagged lives women live in Kerala. A place where talk of migration is on everyone’s lips, where fear of divisive rightism is gradually penetrating, where boat races takes the local to the global, where Jagjit Singh’s ghazals are as as admired as Mammootty’s portrayal of Majeed in Balyakalasakhi.

Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata as a Junior Research Fellow. He writes about books on Instagram and X.

The Menstrual Coup­é, Shahina K Rafiq, translated from the Malayalam by Priya K Nair, Hachette India.