Telling seductive stories of love during war is one of humanity’s favourite traditions. If there are a few constants that define our species, love and war must certainly qualify, as do our tales about the two together. Sunny Singh’s short story collection, Refuge: stories of war (and love), is a welcome addition, approaching the certainties of conflict, violence and love as they intertwine, however briefly.
The settings, varied in time and location, are rarely moored in explicit descriptions of the conflict at hand. In Refuge, all conflicts share enough similarity that they don’t require closer identification. The place descriptions, the cultural clues send deep tap roots down to allow the story to flourish and expand, but they remain unframed by the easy markers of historical labels in spite of clearly being well-researched. There’s everything from Cold War espionage to WWII villages to Himalayan border conflicts and beyond; if you know, you know. If you don’t, you don’t, and that doesn’t really matter because the stories are eternal in their longing and pain.
A wartime village abortionist puts her knitting needles to various uses on household items and on the survivors of rape while she contemplates her own nascent problem. Lovers reveal their tortured pasts to one another, reaching for a new present and future. A child concocts a plan to capture Death so that it can’t follow her father into battle.
The fact that specific politics remain distant influences on each story is another indication that the stories aren’t about a particular political ideology. The writing and collection of the stories manifest a statement in and of themselves, a fist raised against violence and injustice, and a hand that opens each time in absolution through kindness that is offered freely, if only in passing.
As in her novel, Hotel Arcadia, and her recent non-fiction work, A Bollywood State of Mind, Singh brings in a wealth of cultural knowledge across continents and eras. The interface of colonialism, class, sexism, and culture is rendered with a deep understanding that nothing, ever, is simply as it seems, even in the simplest moments. The writing lets the deep complexity of the stories and emotions do the heavy lifting, in one case reading like an old spy novel, in another like a fable. The stories are up close, almost confidential, crafted to fit in the palm of your hand and carry around, rubbing a thumb over the spiky bits as a reminder. Some might gulp down the stories, but I found them best read in a series of short sittings. These are delicacies that will linger—devouring them all at once would be both greedy and dangerous to the reader’s dreams.
The stories in Refuge make sharp incisions and then peer inside, to the shrapnel moments, to extract what might still heal or kill. By fearlessly throwing those who have known only their local circle, together with those who intrude from outside and bring not only violence of body, but of spirit, Singh creates characters who find themselves unwillingly disarmed by what they find. But love doesn’t stop the wars, and the wars don’t stop love. “Love is dangerous, even deadly. Maybe more than war.”
Many of the stories delve into the after-effects of war, the long comet tail of trauma that follows violence in never-ending orbits around the ruins. Whether for the survivors, for the perpetrators, or for the distant families of those who never come home, these are also the facets of love and war that are eternal and generational. A woman’s long-lasting act of love defies the system that resulted in the murder of her family, decades after the deaths occurred. The child survivor of a massacre matures into someone prepared to confront violence in the most direct way possible. And in The Wait, a widow’s vigil and activism on the part of a husband long since disappeared takes a surprising turn.
War inflicts trauma, and most often, it is men who inflict the damage. In Tulips, it is someone who carries violence within her everywhere she goes, whether overtly in Abu Ghraib prison or covertly at her local flower seller. Whether the subjects are human or plant, there is no real mercy. The proximity of love and war, of death and sex, reflects the day-to-day lived experiences of humanity pushed to extremes. There are two stories of imprisonment here that bookend one another. It’s a treat to come upon the second one unawares and discover the same characters, the same place, in a slightly different time—but with a new perspective on just who is imprisoned, and by which walls.
We live in an era where war is more intimate and yet more abstract than ever. It’s everywhere, all the time, kept up to date with frightening and graphic immediacy, right next to ads for productivity-boosting software, dance moves, and silly dog videos. We can see it up close and in the now with ease, if we choose to look, or we can look away and keep scrolling. We can see outstretched hands begging for help that come right through our screens, and yet we seem unable to do much about it except what we have always done: Protest it, look for solutions, try to help, donate, vote, try to ignore the onset of despair, then demand accountability.
Refuge is a collection that walks many roads, but which holds up a signpost: Love is always the one path forward through violence, even if just for a moment of self-redemption.
