India, July 5 -- In Namita Gokhale's Life on Mars, the women speak as if they have nothing left to lose. Or perhaps they've simply grown bored of politeness. Across 16 stories divided into two parts, Gokhale writes women who stagger through marriage proposals, viral fevers, God, bureaucracy and desire. It is not just that they are ordinary, it is that Gokhale trusts their ordinariness to hold meaning. She trusts their stories to bend and reflect the tragicomedy of living in a society that never quite knows what to do with women who think. Take Savithri, the protagonist of Savithri and the Squirrels, who introduces herself with a nonchalant bombshell: "I am one of the five Panchkanyas." The invocation is as layered as it is ludicrous; absurdly sacred. The Panchkanyas - Ahalya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara and Mandodari - are figures from Hindu mythology, revered despite (or because of) their sexual complexity. But Savithri? She works at a matrimonial agency, possibly faked her resume, and feeds squirrels as a form of religious praxis. The juxtaposition is not meant to amuse (though it does) but to shake loose the reader's assumptions about what it means for a woman to be mythic in India. Savithri's "gajra of fresh mogra flowers" and her thin braid channel some inner theatre. "You North Indians don't even know the difference between Italy and idli," she spits at the narrator, furious that her name, Savithri Subramaniam, is so often mispronounced. "Subramanian is not a Subramaniam," she says, as though identity itself might rupture over a vowel. Gokhale has long been alert to how language betrays social stratification, and this story practically throbs with it. She is slyly mythological and sarcastic, but in service of something deeper. She draws from the Indian short-story tradition that has given us Krishna Sobti, Mahasweta Devi and Ismat Chughtai, all writers who understood that a woman's inner world is a battleground no less sacred than Kurukshetra. But unlike some of her predecessors, Gokhale rarely positions her characters as victims. Even in their most pitiful states, they are full of unpredictable movement. The titular Life on Mars is less interested in extraterrestrial questions than it is in the loneliness of a woman who has outlived her husband by a decade, is ignored by her grown sons, and falls into an accidental friendship with a man far younger than her, one Udit Narain, whom she instantly recognises as "a crank." The real story isn't him, it's her wry self-awareness. "Even seeing my name in print doesn't give me a lift anymore," she says, in a moment of bone-dry deflation. Unlike the melancholic, inward turn of much Western short fiction, where women are often drowning in epiphanies and bathtub wine, Gokhale's characters have larger Indian sounds, that of landladies, astrologers, nosy aunties, fevers, lockdowns and WhatsApp forwards. These are not metaphors. The author doesn't need to point neon arrows at her symbols. She doesn't write like she's afraid to bore. And if you expect catharsis, you may not find it. What you get instead is clarity. The book's two-part structure is almost invisible, as themes spill into each other. Titles are deceptively simple: The Rock, The Weather in Darjeeling, The Girl Who Could Not Weep. But the author's women are not symbols. They don't stand in for "India" or "trauma" or "feminism." They stand in for themselves; a bold, almost defiant literary move in a culture that loves to reduce. Namita Gokhale has always been a shapeshifter. From Paro to Things to Leave Behind, she has chronicled women with scandalous relationships. But Life on Mars feels different. This is her at her most distilled. There is a lightness to the prose. One feels she is laughing, not just at the world, but at herself. She is not interested in exalting women through their suffering. Her project is something colder and more subversive: to inhabit the consciousness of women so intimately that their decisions no longer appear moral or immoral, just inevitable. The pleasure of reading Life on Mars is that the stories aren't driven by moral arcs. They are driven by discomfort. Qandhari in Chronicles of Self-Exile blindfolds herself and becomes a queen, a mother of a hundred sons. She is a woman raging at the absurdity of her fate. "There is no mirror in his eyes," Zara, the servant and witness, tells her. This is perhaps the saddest line in the book. Qandhari's reply is chilling: "You think this is a whim, Zara. No, it is a vow." What Gokhale has written is interior archaeology. She scrapes away at the grand narratives until all that's left is the raw, stubborn ruin of one woman's will. Qandhari is not alone in this landscape of estranged women. The stories in the collection are not linked, but have a shared frequency. They are all about women who speak through refusal. There is something almost defiant in the author's unwillingness to redeem her characters. Indian women short-story writers have long been invested in the iconography of female rebellion. What sets Gokhale apart is her studied refusal of political neatness. Her women do not rise. They don't heal. They linger, rot, obsess and sometimes disappear. There is something deeply unsettling about this and it is exactly what gives Life on Mars its charge. What makes her fiction stand apart from the more anodyne pieces of Indian writing in English is her unembarrassed theatricality. Her language too, though occasionally ornamental, never distracts from the emotional grime of her characters. You don't so much read Gokhale's prose as eavesdrop on it....