Polymorphism by Indira Chandrasekhar

Taboo, desire and a dead woman's saris layer the lives of women who board together in a widow's household. A cinema fan encounters his idol and the cruel, fragile world that creates and holds her. A child wonders if the discarded siblings who had once lain next to her in a petri dish were touched by the family bond that she struggles to make sense of. Lovers decide to float away into a world where the disappointments of domesticity and stale love can never touch them. A woman, resisting her family's pressure to produce heirs must confront a primal need to bear children. Polymorphism presents nineteen stories that shift realities and twist perceptions and veer on the edge of strange, slipstream, speculative fiction. The vulnerabilities and the wild, visceral anxieties of the characters that populate the stories come alive under the empathy they evoke. Textured by the author's scientific research on biological molecules and deeply informed by family stories, the collection...