My Mother Pattu

Finely textured, humane and deeply relevant, these stories of love, loss, and the politics of identity, race, and belonging, challenge comfortable conventions about ourselves

Deeply humane, in turn wry and humorous, the stories in this collection haunt readers with their searing honesty. A woman, deeply in love with her husband, discovers to her anguish that the love of a good man is not enough. A little boy tries hard to hold his family together as his parents’ marriage disintegrates before his eyes. A mother has a poignant yet brutal conversation with God about her severely disabled son. Three young people idealistically reject racial prejudice and stereotyping, only to find that in Malaysia, their future paths are largely determined by ethnicity and privilege. The extent to which a woman will go in her hatred for her daughter’s childhood friend, ends in a violent aftermath.

Meet the extraordinary in ordinary people when they confront the truth of their past and present—and refuse to look away. Authentic and unsentimental, each story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit even as it challenges comfortable conventions about identity, love, family, community, race relations

An award-winning writer, Saras Manickam’s story, ‘My Mother Pattu’ won the regional prize for Asia in the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Contest. In 2021, it was included in the anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, published by Bloomsbury, and in 2022, it was published in The Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010–2020. She also won the 2017 DK Dutt Award for her story, ‘Charan’. Some of her other stories have appeared in Silverfish and Readings from Readings anthologies, while one was shortlisted for the 2021 Masters Review Summer Short Story Award.

Contents 1. Number One, Mambang Lane 2. Witch Lady 3. Dey Raju 4. My Mother Pattu 5. Charan 6. The Princess of Lumut 7. Invisible 8. It’ s All Right, Auntie 9. Will You Let Him Drink the Wind? 10. Woman in the Mirror 11. When We Are Young 12. When I Speak of Kuala Lumpur 13. Cartwheels on the Corridor 14. Call It by Its Name Acknowledgements Permissions and Credits