Mridula Koshy's new stories book

MRIDULA KOSHY

‘These stories are all about ways of seeing, including the whole range of seeing — from objectification to empathy. Looking at people is a national pastime in India. We’re always staring and being stared at. But where is our curiosity? Where is the compassion?

Mridula Koshy’s first collection of short stories," If It Is Sweet," will be launched in September this year. The stories are not directly linked to one another, but the lives of her characters, who might belong to very different social groups, intersect. People in these stories often find themselves pulled together by grief, or loss. Koshy says that the stories make the same point: how do people, who are so divided by class, gender, race and so on, view each other? “People have written a lot about this: the tragedy of the upper middle class not ‘seeing’ other people. But that’s not true. I think we are all very painfully aware of each other.”