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In her iconic “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), Donna Haraway had declared the boundary between science fiction and social reality to be an optical illusion. One possible interpretation of this is the breaking down of the distance between telling stories and living in them, in a world where “we are all cyborgs”; where the “cyborg” is a construct of an inevitable posthumanism, a rejection of the boundaries between human, animal and machine. In many ways, Haraway was pointing the way forward, to a feminist future of SF and speculative fiction, even as she made a critique of exclusionary, western feminism.
At around the same time, another feminist theorist, Sarah Lefanu (Feminism and Science Fiction, 1988), credited feminist discourse from the mid 1960s onwards with having finally shifted the status quo of gender politics in SF, and explored how “science fiction, despite its preponderantly male bias, offers a freedom to women writers, in terms of style as well as content, that is not available in mainstream fiction.” Lefanu studied SF written by women as offering a means of “fusing political concerns with the playful creativity of the imagination”. In the decades that have followed, both Haraway and Lefanu have proven to be prophetic as SF and, even more so, speculative fiction (cousins, never to be mistaken for each other), have increasingly turned to representing socio-political reality with a critical lens.
The lived reality of 21st century
Puloma Ghosh’s debut collection of short stories, Mouth, speaks to both Haraway and Lefanu, reflecting the lived reality of the 21st century at a slant, wearing its feminist politics on its skillfully crafted sleeves, breaking down the binary of human and other, as it carves out a new space where women’s subjectivity defines itself outside of cultural normatives, privileging embodiment, desire and sexuality. Speculative fiction is a tricky beast to pin down, considering its wild affinity for other genres – horror, fantasy, magic realism – as seen often in the writings of Vandana Singh, Manjula Padmanabhan, SB Divya, and Mimi Mondal, among contemporary practitioners. The eleven stories in this anthology map the same amorphous territory.
In “Desiccation”, the teenage protagonist, fascinated with the idea of death, falls in love with a girl who is eerily vampiric. In “Supergiant”, a performer wears a skin that makes her the perfect commodity on stage, inspiring her audience to fall obsessively in love with her. “Leaving Things” has a vet assist in the birth of a wolf-child that grows into a dangerously attractive man. “Persimmons” is centred around a curse that passes from mothers to daughters, in what seems to be a borrowing from folklore. “Nip” is a forceful rejection of anthropocentrism (and a strong contender for stories you must read in 2025). “K” is a haunting that hinges on love instead of fear. There is a distinct lack of tropiness in these stories, a refusal to conform to the norms of any genre. Margaret Atwood wrote in her delightful study of science/speculative fiction in In Other Worlds (2011), “When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance.” Ghosh’s stories exemplify this insouciance, with a sharp insertion of defiance and extra-dry social satire.
The world of Mouth is adjacent to our own. Adjacent, but at a slight, discomfiting distance. “Desiccation” is set in a space that could well be a possible future for our war-obsessed times, where the worst excesses of authoritarian regimes are normalized by repetition: “There’s a war going on, unlike any that preceded it (…) they conscripted all the men in the country for a top-secret purpose. There were no battles we could see, no bloodshed on soil. Nobody could be trusted to know what was going on because we were surrounded by leaky technology that could see, hear, touch, read (…) after the initial shock and a few transitional years, most people in our town became comfortable.”
“Anomaly” presents another iteration of an authoritarian state where citizens have more duties than rights, where news is both controlled and manipulated, where surveillance is the norm and a “time war” has caused a dangerous temporal anomaly that the government has monetised, turning it into a tourist experience. “The Fig Tree” unfolds in what looks like a contemporary Kolkata, sporting the Mamata Banerjee brand of aggressively blue and white paint along sidewalks and on buildings, even as it becomes a site of “cyborgian” transmogrification. “Leaving Things” takes the reader into a dystopic world where wild animals have reclaimed urban spaces, but, much as in real, patriarchal societies, women are more vulnerable than other demographics. In the stories of Mouth, the reader will recognize the flaws, fragmentariness, noise, and un/fulfilled desires of their own.
A riotous homage to mothers
Ghosh dedicates the book to her mother and grandmothers and the “scary” bedtime stories they told her. Appropriately enough, it turns out, as these stories are a riotous homage to missing mothers, difficult daughters, and an updated, post-anthropocene version of things that go bump in the night. Insistently, Mouth tells of women’s experiences in a posthuman, apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic world, where, unsurprisingly, not much has shifted in patriarchal patterns of being. “The Fig Tree” begins with Ankita returning to India with her mother’s ashes, yearning for a lost time and space, desperate to find a connection with her mother and foremothers by visiting her grandmother’s now decrepit house. Multiple stories speak of a doubling of sorts, of daughters taking on the same roles as their mothers. The vet in “Leaving Things”, ruminating over the repetitive pattern of men leaving homes, families, relationships, says, “I was born only to become my mother’s silhouette against the oval window of our front door, watching another man walk away.”
Ghosh’s stories ask the same questions about inter-generational conflict that so many women writers across genres are now asking in their writing – are daughters fated to repeat the mistakes of their mothers? Must they, like the mythic Persephone and Demeter, suffer separation, caught always in a love-hate bind? Ghosh has her mothers and daughters making sacrifices for each other, daughters searching for mothers and mother-figures, mothers birthing daughters only to pass on their curse, mothers in uneasy relationships with daughters they cannot quite understand.
The one thing that ties all eleven stories together is their use of the body as an active site of desire, sexuality (often queer sexuality), and self-affirmation. As signalled in its provocative title (brought into fruitful meaning with its cover image), Ghosh centres her stories on embodiment, with woman after leading woman claiming control over her desires, her body, her choices. “The Fig Tree” calls attention to the stigma that still attaches to menstruation, turning the body impure, and the concomitant humiliation that it engenders for the woman made to hide herself and any evidence of her menstruating body. There is a lot of sex in these stories, but it is never gratuitous or “only” erotic.
In the opening story, Meghana’s first sexual experience is about ecstasy entwined with the illicit pleasure of death. In “In the Winter”, sex turns into a strategy for survival in hostile circumstances. In “Supergiant”, it is an emotional connect – to a lover, but also to oneself. “Nip” is a tongue-firmly-in-cheek critique of over-consumption in an overly capitalistic order, and a complex re-working of corporeality, desire, and sex. “Natalya”, steeped in memory, nostalgia, and desire, lays bare the body, literally, in the act of postmortem examination. Here, more obviously than in other stories, it is the body that bears on it, in scars and anomalies and its sheer physicality, an entire map of the individual’s past, their relationships, their trauma, and their love.
Women will inhabit the bodies they want, the way they want, these stories seem to scream. Echoing Hélène Cixous’s “Women must write through their bodies”, Puloma Ghosh has the women in her stories pull together seemingly disparate strands of language, sexuality and embodiment to tell stories of love, lust, and loss through their bodies. I cannot recommend the book enough.
Mouth: Stories, Puloma Ghosh, Astra House/Penguin Random House.
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