By Vandana Menon
“Listen deeper when the pace is quicker,” writes Tuljha B Reddy in her debut collection Inheritance of Longing, in which stories tumble out one after the other — each one exploring the inner lives of women as they navigate their desires, moralities, and silences.
The collection maps the lives of women across class, caste, religion, and generations across
contemporary India, and is refreshingly honest: Reddy writes about women in all their
complexities.
Her background as an architect and designer shines through her fiction — she is particularly attuned to how people inhabit their inner worlds when there’s no one around, and how longing often shapes our emotional homes.
The collection spans eight stories told through alternating voices and perspectives; usually a woman and a man who has misunderstood her completely. The opening story is the collection’s crown jewel: a glittering tale of a Brahmin girl mentored by her Devadasi guru who teaches her about the liberation of letting go, juxtaposed against the bitterness of another woman whose boredom calcified into purposelessness.
Other standouts include a story about a divorced couple reminiscing about their marriage while one swipes through Tinder and the other recounts his crippling insecurities. The final story, a searing look at the burden of shame, is one that Reddy says drained her to write — and understandably so, because it goes from rage to retaliation without softening it.
Not just stories of simple ‘nice’ women
Her characters in Inheritance of Longing are not simple ‘nice’ women. They can be cruel, chaotic, calculating, petty… and just plain tired. And this is what makes the collection shine. In a literary landscape painted with women who suffer, Reddy dares to write women who act — and act without apology.
One of the collection’s best moments comes at the very start in its preface, when Reddy is unusually transparent about her own anxieties regarding her book. The collection was assembled from fragments written at various times in her life, and it shows. In a way, the preface to the collection addresses the kind of feminism Reddy writes about: admittedly imperfect, open to learning and forgiving, but most of all rooted in reality.
And the book’s unevenness cannot diminish its necessity. Reddy is writing about Indian women’s inner lives with an intelligence and lack of sentimentality that does credit to the genre. Not only does Reddy have her own perspective on issues, she has the nerve to follow her fiction into uncomfortable territory. Inheritance of Longing is a debut of genuine ambition, and in its best moments, real distinction.
Inheritance of Longing is currently available for purchase on Amazon.
(Vandana Menon is a Delhi based journalist.)
| Edited by Yunus Lasania | | 
