What does it mean to leave? Is it an act of courage, a necessity, a betrayal, or a slow unbelonging? This question pulses through Ritu Menon’s anthology, A Stone Thrown in a Pond, a collection that brings together poets, journalists, scholars, and writers to pick at the threads of departure. The result is a mosaic of reflections—some piercing in their clarity, others clouded by their own intimacy—that ultimately reveals how leaving is less a single action than a lifelong condition.
Menon, a founder of India’s first feminist press, has assembled an impressive and diverse roster. The table of contents reads like a roll call of South Asian literary and intellectual talent: the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, the poet Arundhathi Subramaniam, the cultural critic Ranjit Hoskote, the journalist Chaitanya Kalbag, the Hindi writer Kshama Kaul, the memoirist Anita Anand, the novelist Stephen Alter, and the feminist scholar and publisher Ritu Menon herself, among others. Each is tasked with examining leaving—of homes, homelands, identities, lovers, and lives. The anthology’s ambition is its defining feature, and its unevenness, its lingering truth.
The most compelling entries are those where the political and the personal merge into a single, urgent voice. Adania Shibli’s contribution, “Of Place, Time and Language,” is a masterwork of restrained fury. Writing from within the grinding reality of occupation, she examines leaving not as choice but as a pervasive, suffocating condition. Her prose maps the psychological terrain of existing in a space where departure is a constant, low-grade threat. It stands in stark, necessary contrast to more nostalgic pieces, grounding the entire collection in a world of forced movement and fractured geographies.
Inheritance and erasure
Equally powerful are the offerings from writers grappling with inheritance and erasure. Ranjit Hoskote’s poetic sequence, which includes “Sidi Mubarak Bombay” and “Refugee,” draws from forgotten historical figures and aesthetic movements to explore the leaving imposed by colonialism and conflict. He weaves archival fragments into a lament that feels both specific and vast. Kshama Kaul’s stark testimony of exile from Kashmir, “They Threw Me Out,” carries a similar weight of historical rupture, her concise prose echoing the sudden, violent nature of displacement.
When the collection turns inward, toward the domestic and the familial, its successes are more varied. Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems on the loss of her parents—“Finding Dad” and “Deleting the Picture”—are shattering in their simplicity. She focuses on the artifacts left behind: a bottle, a handwriting sample, a digital file. In doing so, she captures the way death is the ultimate, irreversible leaving, and how the living are left to sift through the stubbornly material echoes of a vanished presence. Similarly, Anita Anand’s “26 Homes” transforms a life of perpetual motion into a philosophical inquiry into belonging, asking what we carry from each departure and what we willingly shed.
When the collection turns inward, toward the domestic and the familial, its successes are more varied. (Generated using AI)
However, the anthology’s broad mandate can also be a weakness. Some contributions feel like polished excerpts from larger, separate projects, inserted here because they tangentially touch the theme. This creates a pacing issue; the emotional and intellectual voltage of a piece like Shibli’s is difficult to follow with a more leisurely meditation, however lovely. Bulbul Sharma’s remembrance of a lost garden or Chaitanya Kalbag’s reflections on reconciliation, for instance, operate on a different frequency. The reader is asked to constantly reset—from the geopolitical to the domestic, from the poetic to the prosaic—and not every transition lands gracefully. This is a book better consumed in piecemeals.
The myth of a romantic goodbye
What the collection does achieve, overall, is a subtle dismantling of the romantic myth of the leave-taker. There is little glamour here. Instead, we see the exhaustion of the refugee, the guilt of the survivor, the mundane paperwork of relocation, the haunting of empty spaces. Jerry Pinto, in his characteristically cerebral style, probes the gendered dimensions of the trope, noting how narratives of departure are often coded male, while women are frequently left “in memoriam.” Sabyn Javeri’s essay on leaving behind the “good girl” persona complements this, framing departure as an internal, psychological rebellion. Together with Geeta Patel’s heart-wrenching yet masterfully penned account of a traumatic childhood, Aamer Hussein’s diasporic memories, Gagan Gill’s poetic fragments of Partition, and Manjula Narayan’s personal chronicle, they form a chorus that, while not always in perfect harmony, affirms the complexity of its subject.
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A Stone Thrown in a Pond is a case file on the human heart’s complicated relationship with exit. Some pieces resonate with the clarity of a struck bell, others murmur from a distance. Yet together, they accomplish Menon’s implied goal, which is to demonstrate that leaving is never a clean line. It is a circle, a recurring ghost, a stone whose ripples continue long after it has disappeared from sight. For its brightest, most unflinching moments, this collection is a worthy and often profound companion to the solitudes it describes.
A Stone Thrown in a Pond: Essays & Poems on the Enigma of Leaving edited by Ritu Menon Women Unlimited Ink Pages: 226 Price: Rs 699
Aishwarya Khosla is a key editorial figure at The Indian Express, where she spearheads and manages the Books & Literature and Puzzles & Games sections, driving content strategy and execution. Aishwarya's specialty lies in book reviews, literary criticism and cultural commentary. She also pens long-form feature articles where she focuses on the complex interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She is a proud recipient of The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections. This fellowship required intensive study and research into political campaigns, policy analysis, political strategy, and communications, directly informing the analytical depth of her cultural commentary.
As the dedicated author of The Indian Express newsletters, Meanwhile, Back Home and Books 'n' Bits, Aishwarya provides consistent, curated, and trusted insights directly to the readership. She also hosts the podcast series Casually Obsessed. Her established role and her commitment to examining complex societal themes through a nuanced lens ensure her content is a reliable source of high-quality literary and cultural journalism.
Her extensive background across eight years also includes previous roles at Hindustan Times, where she provided dedicated coverage of politics, books, theatre, broader culture, and the Punjabi diaspora.
Write to her at aishwaryakhosla.ak@gmail.com or aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com. You can follow her on Instagram:
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When the collection turns inward, toward the domestic and the familial, its successes are more varied. (Generated using AI)