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Ma is Scared and Other Stories is an English-language collection of ten short stories by Anjali Kajal, translated by Kavita Bhanot. Its stories follow women and, most often, mothers and daughters in contemporary northern India. Reviewers read them through gender, caste, education, work, public space and the pandemic period, and the book is best approached as fiction that makes those pressures visible through particular lives.
What the book is
The collection brings together ten stories selected by the translator, Kavita Bhanot. The Asian Review of Books, in a 2023 review, describes them as examining women across two generations, mainly mothers and daughters, in present-day northern India. The same review places the stories against everyday harassment and other forms of gendered vulnerability. That is a critic’s reading of the fiction, not a statistical account of how common these experiences are.
Two details about the translation frame the book. Penguin Random House India describes Bhanot as the translator and states that the English translation won the 2021 PEN Translates Award. The award belongs to the translation, not to the original Hindi text. Scroll, in its review, notes that this is Kajal’s first book to appear in English, and that the selected stories span a writing career of roughly two and a half decades. The collection therefore gathers work from across that span rather than a single period.
The book is fiction, not a documentary. The sources consulted for this article do not mention a film or documentary adaptation, so readers coming to it with a documentary interest should treat it as a literary text that depicts social realities from inside the characters’ lives.
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Which edition you are looking at
Two paperback editions are in circulation, from different publishers and markets, and they carry different ISBNs and publication dates. Check the ISBN before ordering, because the two records should not be treated as the same book.
| Edition | ISBN | Published | Listed price | Page count |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| India Penguin paperback (Penguin Random House India) | 9780143465515 | February 2024 | MRP ₹399 | 208 pages |
| Comma Press paperback (UK) | 9781912697663 | 15 June 2023 | RRP £9.99 | Not stated on the Comma Press listing consulted |
Prices are the listed figures at the time of the publisher pages consulted and may have changed. The Penguin India page also lists buying options, including Amazon.
The stories
The publisher’s description gives several entry points into the collection, and reviewers single out a few stories for closer reading. The four below are the ones named in the reviews consulted.
“Ma Is Scared”
The title story centres on a mother’s fear for her daughter’s safety. Penguin’s description presents it as an anxious mother waiting for her daughter to come home. The story turns the everyday worry of a parent into the book’s organising question: what it means to raise a daughter in a public world that is not built to protect her.
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Hindustan Times reads “History” through a past caste-related wrong between two former college friends. Penguin’s synopsis describes the same situation as an encounter with an old college friend that reopens a caste-based injury. The story shows how a wound from education can outlast the institution where it began, and how a reunion can reopen it without warning.
“Sanitiser”
Hindustan Times connects “Sanitiser” to caste, schooling and the pandemic. The story uses the pandemic period as a setting in which existing social divides, including those around schooling, remain in place rather than disappearing. Readers should take this as the reviewer’s reading of the story rather than a general claim about how the pandemic affected any community.
“Deluge”
“Deluge” is one of the stories reviewers name as central to the collection. The sources consulted give no plot detail for it, so this article does not summarise it.
Other entry points
- A woman confronting the accumulated weight of sexual abuse during a lecture, as described in Penguin’s synopsis.
- Penguin’s framing of the collection around ordinary women whose experiences are rarely seen from Dalit points of view.
How gender and caste run through the book
Scroll describes Kajal’s writing as attentive to the ways women resist patriarchy and casteism, and also the ways they can reproduce those same structures. That matters for how the stories should be read. The characters are not simply victims or simply allies; their choices about daughters, friends and classmates can carry the same hierarchies that hurt them.
The stories also treat gender and caste together rather than as separate issues. Penguin’s description places the book at the level of intersecting identities, so that a woman’s experience of school, work, family or public space is shaped by both at once. The same caution applies here as elsewhere: the book shows particular women, and it should not be read as a single account of what all women in northern India experience. Penguin’s own framing of the collection, which centres perspectives rarely seen in mainstream fiction, is the publisher’s claim, and readers can weigh it against the stories themselves.
The translation
Bhanot’s translator’s note, as quoted by Scroll, explains her approach. Her stated objective was “not domesticating Anjali’s text into a Western context, but rather keeping some of the flavour of the original language and context.” In practice, this means the English text keeps the social vocabulary and setting of the original rather than smoothing them into a generic international idiom. Readers who want the Hindi original will find that the English is intended to carry its particular cultural texture.
What the book can and cannot tell you about society
The collection is a strong guide to how particular women experience gender and caste pressures. It is not evidence of how widespread those pressures are. The reviews consulted describe the fiction and interpret it; they do not provide prevalence data on caste discrimination, women’s safety, education or pandemic effects. Readers looking for those figures will need to consult dedicated surveys and official statistics, not the stories.
For readers choosing between the two paperbacks, the practical differences are the publisher, ISBN, publication date and listed price. The Penguin India edition is the one with a listed page count in the sources consulted, at 208 pages.
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