Book Review Of 'Bandaged Moments'

There are books that comfort and there are books that confront. Bandaged Moments, a collection of short stories by Indian women writers on mental health, belongs firmly to the latter category. Edited by Nabanita Sengupta and Nishi Pulugurtha, this anthology brings together 26 stories translated from 17 Indian languages — each exploring the fragile, complex terrain of the mind with empathy and courage.

In India, conversations related to mental health have long been conducted in whispers in dark corners if possible. The subject has always been shrouded in stigma, reduced to euphemisms and reflects a legacy of shame. What this anthology does is to bring the hushed conversations out into the open. It reminds readers that mental health is not the fault of the person concerned but a social reality that needs visibility and understanding.

What sets Bandaged Moments apart from other anthologies on similar themes is its refusal to simplify. The stories do not offer easy redemptions or tidy resolutions. Instead, they dwell in ambiguity acknowledging that healing, when it comes, is uneven and incomplete. The editors have managed to curate stories that avoid melodrama or clinical detachment with insight and sensitivity. Instead, there is quiet restraint and dignity, even when the subject matter turns dark.

The collection covers a wide range of subjects and places. Some stories unfold in intimate, domestic spaces — kitchens, classrooms, crowded lanes — where anxiety and despair wear the mask of the everyday. Others step into surreal or allegorical territory, exploring madness as both metaphor and lived experience.

For example in “The Smell of News” by K. R. Meera, we enter the newsroom of Anna Santhosh Paul, as she senses a rotten smell and realises it signals something far darker adroitly combining dread and journalistic urgency. Then in Magadhi: by Priti Kumari, a village girl’s fear of marriage, labelled as hysteria, brings out the gendered frames of mental illness in rural India. A poet’s schizophrenia in Najma Mukherjee’s Flying Fish is complicated by lost love and isolation shows a world disintegrating into quiet fragments,

The narrative voices shift seamlessly between patients, caregivers, friends and bystanders, creating a many-sided portrait of how mental illness touches different lives.

The title of the book, is an a appropriate metaphor that is taken from Emily Dickinson’s The Souls had Bandaged Moments.A bandage covers and protects wounds, shielding pain and enabling recovery. These stories do not deal with open wounds but provide glimpses into lives where the act of survival itself becomes resistance. The prose across the anthology is varied — spare and lyrical in some, conversational or fragmentary in others — reflecting the different textures of pain and endurance that the writers project.

One of the strengths of the book lies in its cultural rootedness - here illness intersects with gender, caste, class and faith. Families hover over every breakdown; neighbours gossip surreptitiously; public hospitals loom large. The anthology captures how mental distress is shaped not only by the self but by the systems surrounding it.

That said, the collection’s ambition can also be its challenge. The sheer range of languages and voices makes it uneven in tone. Some

stories feel too brief to leave a lasting impact, while others demand a slower reading to appreciate their subtlety. A few translations carry traces of stiffness, which momentarily distance the reader from the emotional core. Yet, these are minor quibbles in what is otherwise a commendable and necessary work.

What makes Bandaged Moments ultimately moving is its humanity. It neither romanticises madness nor presents it as an aberration. It invites readers to listen — to silences, to fragments, to small moments of connection that make endurance possible. In doing so, it reframes mental illness not as something “out there”, but as part of the human condition we all share.

At a time when discussions around mental health are either medicalised or sensationalised, this book restores nuance. It reminds us that literature can still be a form of care — a quiet intervention against forgetting.

What the book has to say may not be comforting – it is in a sense a mirror that reflects the unspoken and profoundly fragile dimensions of the mind.