Nautanki Sala and Other Stories

I had started thinking of her as a lunatic. Instead, I asked her to not worry about others’ opinion… She smiled at me and asked out of the blue, if my cat speaks to me? When I said no, she seemed angry. I felt sorry that I didn’t. I wished I had one, just for her sake. A former communications and brand consultant, Mohua Chinappa has met women from diverse backgrounds, from a tribal Khasi woman who ran a tea stall to a journalist from the Northeast trying to fit in the big city to an unassuming college girl who could not anticipate the ‘consequence’ of her brutish rebuke to a man. So, in Nautanki Saala and Other Stories, an average bar dancer gives an old fart, the finger he deserves, many protagonists believe they are not enough. As a result, the protagonists in this book do these and more: • They deny their feelings • They deny their desires • They make poor decisions Most of the stories in the author’s debut book are based on the women and men she met in a span of two decades, from the early 80s to the 2000s. While the lives of the people are a testament to the cultural-economic shift in these decades, they are also an attempt to strengthen the feminist who hesitates in confiding.