The goons of a mining giant kidnap a tribal activist and force him to shoot a porn film with a prostitute who turns out to be his childhood sweetheart; a cobbler skins his daughter’s hanging corpse to make the special pair of ‘Cinderella shoes’ he had once promised her; a lesbian nurse with bovine features becomes enamoured of a patient and begins to stalk her. Indu Menon’s stories are not for the fainthearted. At the centre of all their blood, gore and broken bones lies the inveterate spirit of women who will not go down without a fight. And yet, the unvarnished truths of her fiction also blend in unexpected ways with her poetic imagination as well as her inventive prose. Many have observed that Menon’s chutzpah and visceral storytelling make her a worthy successor to Kamala Das. Appearing in English for the first time, The Lesbian Cow and Other Stories will make you marvel at the grit and raw fierceness of one of contemporary Malayalam literature’s most electric writers.
