The Light of Day, a review of Yellow Chrysanthemum by Munmun Samanta. Prolific Pulse LLC. Raleigh, North Carolina. 2025.
In “Sia’s Dream of Dawn” a woman is alone in a garden, thinking, and very attuned to her surroundings. Readers at first think she may be an artist and she’s going to paint the sky. As the story unfolds, readers learn she’s a writer, and it’s as if she’s giving the sky a story, with characters, a plot, a conflict to be developed, heightened, and resolved. And she is. And the sky’s story, like clouds in a river, mirrors the writers. It’s original, poetic, and well worth reading again. Yellow Chrysanthemum as a collection is a story of struggle. Sia “loves this part of the garden. But more than that she loves this confluence of light and shadow.” A struggle to be honest with herself. The collection comprises a struggle for freedom as an artist; for freedom as a wife, daughter, mother, sibling; and for freedom as a person, for equality. “But conventional society never teaches a woman to strike back,” the narrator says in “Written in Blood.”
The stories that depict artists, and scholars are: “Peacock’s Feather,” “Sia’s Dream of Dawn,” “Come Back Somlata,” “Long-forgotten Line,” “A Girl Made of Darkness,” which also involves an individual’s struggle to overcome a society’s prejudice; “Lullaby,” as it invokes the bonding of mother and daughter through song; and “Mad Woman in the Attic,” the story of a woman married to a man who is a successful writer and an emotionally cold, distant husband. His books show empathy for others, but the women in his books reject the woman, just as he does, so she burns his books (his women), and feels at peace.
Stories that involve the struggle of women as members of families are: “Mother India,” “The Caged Bird,” “The Scar,” “Beast of Burden,” “Bright Big Bananas,” “Written in Blood,” and “Uproot.” “Mother India,” the first story in the collection is about hunger and poverty, a mother’s plight to feed herself and her children. It is very visceral; readers feel the hunger in it, and the mother’s desperation. “Uproot,” also about a mother, is contemplative. Should the protagonist stay where she is, or give into her married son’s wish that she leave her home, her job of teaching very young children, and go far away to live with him and his wife? Like “Sia’s Dream …” “Uproot” is a garden story. It begins with Sumita telling the children how a monkey-gardener uprooted trees, to analyze how much water they needed. The children are as delighted with their teacher as she is them, and in the end the story comes back to the garden.
While “Special Dish” has shades of scholastic research, it is primarily a story of the bonding of two women from different classes in society. “A Home of One’s Own,” while it involves family, depicts the plight of women in society at large, a society that says in its morays and traditions that women have no home, the home is the man’s. And in this story, there’s this wonderful sentence: “People say many things, but things are different.” Other stories that involve a woman’s struggle for equality are: “Uma,” “The Kitten and Cleopatra,” and “The Shut Door.” In all these, the plight of one woman is the plight of many.
In “The Shut Door” the narrator says, “It happens sometimes you cannot recognize yourself.” All twenty stories have the unstated adage “be honest with yourself.” Each is an attempt to arrive at some truth. Some stories seem sketched in gray pencils, others in dark blue ink. The light of day is the page on which the story appears. Labels limit. The struggle of the artist, the wife and mother, and the individual all intersect, or seem to, many of them. But in each the author, Munmun Samanta has made a thing of beauty, from her imagination, her vision, and her skill with words. These are stories that ring true; stories of India, of women, of lived lives.
Open her book and see for yourself. You’ll be rewarded. ProlificPulse.com
Peter Mladinic‘s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.
Maiden Rock: Mladinic, Peter: 9798990558557: Amazon.com: Books
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