Book Review | Stories on the House

The premise is disarming enough: four women walk into a bar on a high street on a Wednesday evening. Happy hour has just begun and the choices include raspberry wine, single malt, absinthe, palm toddy, and each drink feels like a personality trait poured into a glass. There’s Bubbly, plump and effervescent; Gaunt, bespectacled and topped with a red beret; Obnoxious, taciturn in a way that feels deliberate; and Madam White, trailing smoke from a spliff like a punctuation mark and a bartender who makes her presence felt at opportune moments. Between them circulates a “talking hat” and whoever wears it must tell a story or buy the next round. Eighteen stories later, the bar becomes something else entirely: a confessional, a stage, a portal where time, place and stories and people float around in a Daliesque dance and all of it refracted through a distinctly female, distinctly urban lens.

Sucheta Dasgupta writes like someone who has spent years listening to voices, cadences, silences and squabbles and then decided to let them overlap rather than fall into neat lines.

The stories in this collection are genre-agnostic: sci-fi rubs shoulders with myth, folklore slips into speculative absurdity, and magic realism arrives without announcement. A sentient computer can marry a ball; Persephone can share narrative space with Yamaraj; an afternoon in the suburbs with a daughter and her Baba can feel as intimate and yet dystopian as any imagined future. The collection doesn’t demand consistency but only imagination from its reader.

A distinctly feminist voice threads through the narratives, not so much as a rigid manifesto but as mood. These are women who observe, who mock, who desire, who refuse to resolve themselves neatly. Even when the stories veer into the surreal, they remain tethered to something recognisable: the exhaustion of modern intimacy, the absurdity of social scripts, the quiet negotiations of urban loneliness and the comfort of human relationships, sometimes not in the most recognisable forms.

Kolkata is less a backdrop than a recurring rhythm in the book. It shows up in flashes like on humid afternoons, languid conversations, tuition classes, a Bengali nationalist listicle, offering a sense of memory and continuance. Appearing in exactly four stories, the city is never over-described, but it lingers, like autobiographical notes you can’t quite place but keep hearing.

What makes Ladies Night different is its refusal to settle into a single storytelling mode. One piece might unfold as wry, observational prose; another slip into free verse; yet another could read like a philosophical joke stretched to its limit. There are Venn diagrams for different kinds of suitors and rotating emotions, stories that feel like murmured gossip, others that tilt toward the allegorical. Not all of them impact you with equal force, but that unevenness is perhaps part of the gamble of the game of stories itself.

As a launch title, Ladies Night seems like a statement of intent that small presses can afford to champion the quirky, and can privilege voice over market neatness.

It’s summer somewhere. Get your favourite tipple and drop this book into your lap, lower the lamp and read on for the pleasure of stories colliding in the half-light.

The reviewer is the author of Temple Tales and translator of Hungry Humans.

Ladies’ Night: Stories

By Sucheta Dasgupta

Running Head Books

pp. 244, Rs 499/-