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There are two ways to read A Kind of Meat and Other Stories by Catherine Thankamma. One is through the lens of a traditional, conservative reality that continues to shape much of Indian society. The other is as a collection of everyday stories about ordinary lives that often go unnoticed. These are stories of the small tremors that govern our lives, similar to the ones millennials like me grew up witnessing, often unaware of the hurt that people rarely talked about.

There are no grand environmental crusades, global wars, or dystopian visions in these stories. They feel as real and routine as our daily habits. But at times, the quotidian becomes unsettling. In the title story, a young girl stirs up trouble without meaning to, simply by telling her landlord’s wife she ate beef to sound cool. Or how another young girl is mocked and dismissed when she tells her mother and aunt that a relative’s son grabbed her breast while she was at their house looking for the bathroom. Through such scenes, Thankamma points to a pattern where women, whether young or old, educated or uneducated, are brushed aside when they try to speak of what they have experienced, especially when it disturbs...

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