A Sitaram’s The Girl I Killed features a temple slave who is a victim of a patriarchal tradition that exploits female bodies and shames them to death for it. K Srinivasarao’s The Master’s Satyanarayana is a heartbreaking tale about rich people’s greed, which deprives the poor of the little they have. Saraswathibai Rajawade’s The Battered Heart exposes sleazy Godmen who preach about the virtues of celibacy while grooming underage girls to be brainwashed into becoming willing bed mates. Belagoankar’s short sheds light on the Niyoga tradition sanctioned by epic lore, where women desperate to become mothers after being berated for their ‘failure’ are pressured into setting aside rules of chastity to welcome a man of proven fertility to impregnate them.

Maguni’s Bullock Cart and other Classic Odia Stories, translated by Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre, and KK Mohapatra, include tales from the pens of those who risked a lot to raise their voices against oppression. Fakir Mohan Senapati has two stories featured here, with the first addressing how challenging it was back in the day to provide an education for a girl child in almost unbearably melodramatic fashion and the second, which is in a lighter vein, recommending a form of treatment for husbands prone to heavy drinking, drug use and womanising. U Kishore Das writes about a ghost whose husband and former suitor were unmitigated jerks who ended up being the end of her. Biswanath Rath’s tale has a widow who is a victim of a baseless canard that makes her already wretched existence immeasurably worse. Suprabha Kar’s The Long Wait shares the plight of a young wife whose husband subjects her to savage beatings after he blows up her dowry, which sends her hurtling down the path of whoredom and worse. Routeray’s Flower of Evil, about an abandoned wife who dies while trying to abort her illegitimate child, is a sock to the solar plexus.

These stories, written with touching simplicity sans the artifice and stylistic literary devices that are liberally employed today by the literati to espouse causes endorsed by the privileged, are redolent with emotional honesty and far more effective in striking a blow against social injustice.

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