Book Title: Heart Lamp
Author: Banu Mausthaq
Translated by: Deepa Bhasthi
Genre: Fictional
The original Heart Lamp was written in the Kannada language, and the English translation by Deepa Bhasthi was published in September 2024 in the UK and then in February 2025 in India. Heart Lamp won the 2025 International Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious global awards for translated fiction.
Heart Lamp is a collection of short stories in which each story describes the condition of women in Muslim society. It shows how, as different male relationships enter a woman’s life—first she becomes a daughter to a father, then a sister to a brother, then a wife to a husband, and then a mother to a son—gradually she kills the woman within herself: her happiness, her desires, her dreams, her interests, and in the end, her own life itself.
In this book, the author Banu Mushtaq has shown how social traditions, customs, beliefs, and the higher status of men in society weigh heavily on a woman’s freedom and her life. It also explains how, while fulfilling her duties toward the men in her household in her everyday life, a woman ends up forgetting about her own life.
This book tells us how, in society, a man’s merely higher status becomes so heavy on a woman’s mind, happiness, desires, and freedom that, even while alive, she is crushed and silenced.
Each story in this book is very calm and quiet in itself. The author has described domestic life in a very simple and ordinary manner, yet this simplicity and ordinariness are presented in such a way that they begin to send cold waves through the reader.
From the beginning of the book to its very last page, all the female characters that appear are, even in their silence, screaming out their suffering. While I was reading this book, there were moments when, only in the very last paragraph of a story, it became clear who the true central character actually was—whether it was the one who had spoken and explained everything, or the one who had remained completely silent.
Although the book is written about women from the Muslim community, when I began reading it, it felt as though the book was speaking about every woman in the world who has set aside her own life and identity and started living—at different times—for her father, for her brother, for her husband, and for her son. As I read on, it began to feel that this book is for every person in the world who has sacrificed their happiness, their desires, their interests, and their freedom to social customs and social relationships. After reading the book, it felt as if even the words that were never written had found their voice within its pages.
When I read the final paragraph of the last story in this book, tears welled up in my eyes as a testament to the fact that the book had touched my heart. I held the book close to my chest. As my heart listened to the heartbeat of each story, it felt as if I had hugged every woman who, though alive, had already lost her life. The girls who watched their mothers suffer and die every day—I embraced them through the pages of Heart Lamp, gently patted their heads, eyes brimming with tears and heart heavy, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” all the while fully aware that it is not okay.
I feel that this book should be read by everyone who, under the weight of society and social relationships, has forgotten themselves. It should be read by everyone who, at some point, has acted against their own desires and done something they never truly wanted to do.
Herat Lamp is not just a book of a few pages; it carries with it thousands of desires that were never fulfilled, which, despite remaining unfulfilled, are screaming out and encouraging the reader to fulfill their own desires.
Thank you
Priya Jakhu