The Woman on the Red Oxide Floor by Shikhandin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Woman whom we meet on the red oxide floor is perhaps every woman’s agonized self as she tries to rebel against the incomprehensible societal forces that remove her sense of self as an individual and relegate her to the status of a ‘housewife’ whose views do not matter. She has become trivialized, she is now ‘nothing’.

Yet her imagination is in her control, and this is what sends her into dream like spaces where she thinks and questions and enters other worlds through her mind space.

She is also the mother of Blue, her son, and we see and understand this world largely through his eyes, as he slowly leaves the cosmos to which he once belonged and becomes more and more a part of this world where he is born as Mamma’s and Baba’s baby. Mamma, who loves him, but also resents him at times, for he has ensnared her into the trappings of motherhood. Mamma, who takes care of him unconditionally as a child, but whom he leaves later to chart his own path in the world.

This book works with the mundane and the extraordinary and takes us in and out of several worlds; making the reader feel as if she has entered a dream world, but also a world where reality comes and goes with all its beauty and bitterness. There is also a future time we enter with this woman who once lay on the red oxide floor, but what she thinks and does at this time, I will let you discover for yourself.

The prose is an exquisite web woven by Shikhandin’s magic fingers, and it leaves us in a dream-like state. There are indeed worlds other than ours, ‘real worlds’— if we only choose to believe.

***

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