Review of Refuge: Stories of War (and Love) by Sunny Singh

Explore Sunny Singh's "Refuge: Stories of War (and Love)," an anthology revealing resilience and tenderness amid the devastation of war.

Wars upend geographies, and then pass, leaving shell-shocked people in their wake. Stories emerge, from the debris of a house, from the silent mist over a mountain, from cold kitchen fires and overturned pots, from the remnants of a childhood or a marriage.

Author and academic Sunny Singh excavates these vital scraps of tormented history, in her new collection of 13 stories, Refuge: Stories of War (and Love). Emanating from areas tethered to violence, these are narratives of the past century that thrum with prophetic urgency. And while destruction is inevitable, so is tenderness. Love seeps into dreadful places, thawing the blood, examining new scars on familiar flesh, celebrating the wounds. The parenthetical and Love of the title hints at this tentative but irresistible shift in mood.  

Some of the stories heighten and depict moments of terror, shame or dishonour. In ‘The Tigress Hunts’, the first-person narrator hides in a paddy swamp, pushed into the mud by her companion, Chitti. Soldiers have arrived in their village, an occurrence that usually portends ruin.  When the narrator returns to her house, she discovers her Amma and Dhanu-akka (elder sister) sprawled by the hand pump, their legs spread out, oozing blood.  

Women, fragile repositories of carnage, inhabit these pages as benumbed protagonists. In ‘Friday Morning Coffee’, set amidst the insurgencies in former Yugoslavia, Nusreta, who has been raped over and over again, serves coffee to one of the officers who assures her that the other men will not return if the coffee is good. The narrative digresses from the atrocities to linger on the process of making coffee: “When the foam is full and creamy, the brew below it thick and dark as sludge, she adds a splash of water and brings it to the table to settle.” A temporary normalcy engulfs the room, but the delusion is broken, when, in a tiny act of defiance, she serves him coffee in a feminine cup covered in yellow flowers, because, “He doesn’t deserve a man’s cup.”  

Author and academic Sunny Singh. | Photo Credit: Instagram.com

Normalcy, or a deep longing to resurrect a beloved home, to undo bereavement and repair truncated families, pervades the pages of this collection. The story ‘Not My Mountains’ ripples with patrolling officer Edgar’s recollections of the blooming hills and valleys that are his home, as he stands vigil on a viciously cold mountainside. In one of the more restrained, delicately-told stories, ‘Faded Serge and Yellowed Lace’, frail old Carmelita sits on a bench facing the municipal offices in a plaza in Madrid. She caresses, obsessively, three pieces of cloth that once belonged to her father and her two brothers who were killed in the Spanish civil war. Her daily, melancholic ritual is mirrored in yet another tale, ‘The Wait’, in which Mrs. Sharma sits on an easy chair in her veranda, waiting for her husband, Squadron Leader A.K. Sharma, to return from war. She has been waiting for 30 years. She has scoured the prisons of Islamabad, Quetta, Multan and Karachi, searching for her husband, thrusting a faded photograph at the prisoners, former officers with petrified eyes, driven to insanity.