I finished reading Antara Banerjee’s book ‘The Goddess in Flesh’ a few days back. I usually allow myself some time before I write about my perspective on a book to check how much of the book stays with me, to check if the book is still relevant for me, and if there are images from the narrative that refuse to leave me. ‘The Goddess in Flesh’ scores on all fronts. The book has three stories - ‘Vama’, ‘Possessed’ and ‘The Forbidden Threshold’. The stories are about women – women shunned by society, women made hapless victims of archaic societal norms, women being treated dispassionately as objects of physical and at times, spiritual gratification. Antara is a painter herself and as you turn the pages of this book, what strikes you immediately are the visuals she weaves with her lucid storytelling. You walk with a little girl along dusty, sun-baked roads in search of her sister who has been brutally sacrificed at the altar of the goddess after having been abducted from a...
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