A powerful collection of literary short stories that explore desire, intimacy, memory and moral unease across villages, small towns, and domestic spaces in India.

‘Something trembled and waited to happen; it beat like a heart.’

In these stories, Pratyaksha turns her gaze towards the intimate theatres of everyday life—villages and small towns, inner courtyards and closed rooms, bodies marked by longing, shame, faith, and hunger. Desire moves quietly through these pages: furtive, unruly, sometimes tender, sometimes unsettling. It slips into kitchens heavy with spice, into marriages and friendships, into childhood memories that refuse to stay buried.

Women and men in these stories live at the edge of permission—watching, waiting, wanting. A fragrance becomes obsession; a glance becomes a wound; a single touch alters the moral weather of a household. Pratyaksha writes with an unflinching attentiveness to the textures of the body and the contradictions of intimacy: pleasure and revulsion, devotion and betrayal, innocence and knowingness coexisting in the same breath.

Spare yet sensuous, unsparing yet deeply humane, The Mistress of Phoolpur maps the fault lines between restraint and transgression, solitude and belonging. These are stories that linger—like heat on skin, like a scent you cannot quite name—asking what it means to desire, to remember, and to live with the consequences of both.