Elevate Difference

Reviews by Disha Mullick

Disha Mullick

Disha Mullick lives and works in New Delhi, with a feminist organisation called Nirantar. She's generally got 5 too many things on her to-do-list, involving planning trainings and special issues with a group of women journalists from rural Uttar Pradesh, writing reports, editing endless web content, articles on feminist pedagogy... all of which she loves, and most of which are never completed. In the moments between home, office and dusty towns that feature in no rough guide in the world - she's always looking for things to write. Book reviews and travel pieces are what most often turn up on along the tracks, and which she loves. Her constant state of being is having too many all-consuming projects to think about, too little time to write, too many places to be, too many beginnings of stories with no end in sight. And wanderlust is her favourite word.

The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story

What is it about the form of the life story—the autobiography—that makes it so seductive and so deeply discomfiting at the same time? I think it’s how the boundaries between private and public, someone else’s life and your own, blur in your reading. The relationship you forge is rich and colorful and insightful, but it’s also dark and violent and difficult to come to terms with.

There Was No One at the Bus Stop

The twelve hours that pass in this slim novella are some of the slowest and hardest ever—both in the lives of the characters and for the reader as well. Set on one day in the lives of two people in a not-so-secret affair, There Was No One at the Bus Stop builds the strained context of their lonely lives, takes you to a point of emotional climax, and then holds you there just a few pages too long, leaving you tired and frustrated. But that’s the price you’re going to have to pay for a deepened understanding of human relationships, it seems.

Tiger Hills

We used to argue as young literary critics that it wasn’t possible to have feminist romantic writing: the terms were contradictory by their very definition. Love stories were necessarily fissured by unequal relations of power, vulnerability, and injustice. This has always been troubling to me, as a diehard romantic, a firm believer in love stories, and a feminist. It was a niggling worry, too, as I read, and was instantly absorbed in, Tiger Hills.