‘Life on Mars’: Namita Gokhale writes of the many images of love and heartbreak in new short stories

There comes a time when you are confronted with all the moments when you were made and unmade by love and its various forces. Love is essential for the true liberation of the soul, but there’s also a fear of being buried under its crushing weight. There is always a risk of love inflating itself to such horrendous proportions that you can no longer recognise it as the same creature you had once nurtured. The beast swallows everything in its path.

Namita Gokhale’s new book of short stories, Life of Mars, imagines love as an unrestrainable creature and examines its afterlife. The sixteen stories in the book have been divided into two sections. The first section, “Love and Other Derangements” features mostly middle-aged women who have been knocked around quite mercilessly by love. The second section, “The Mirror of the Mahabharata”, straddles the present and the formidable epic from a few thousand years ago. Here, the fates of the Mahabharata’s women are reflected in the plight of modern femininity.

In fact, myths and epics make routine appearances in the collection. In the first story, “Savithri and the Squirrel”, a middle-aged woman who claims to be married dutifully feeds squirrels in anticipation of being liberated from her...

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