Baring invisible wounds of mental health

There are books you finish and neatly shelve. Then there are books that sit with you, staring back. ‘Bandaged Moments’, edited by Nabanita Sengupta and Nishi Pulugurtha, falls squarely in the second category. A collection of short stories by Indian women writers on mental health, it is not a gentle offering. It is a tear in the fabric of our social pretence. The volume announces itself not merely as a literary project but as a reckoning with pain, silence, stigma and survival. Each story — 26 in all, from 17 Indian languages — is both deeply personal and disturbingly universal, mapping the inner terrains of mental health that remain taboo in Indian society.

Much of Indian literature has been preoccupied with questions of nationhood, gender, caste and memory. Mental health, though present in scattered texts, rarely takes centre stage. We treat madness like we treat electricity failures. As inconvenient, best concealed, a thing to be endured until the lights come back on. We whisper about the neighbour’s daughter, the relative who disappeared into a hospital, the woman who stopped eating.

What makes this anthology unique is that it does not fetishise pain, nor does it tidy suffering into neat arcs of redemption. Instead, the stories linger in ambiguity, the messiness of emotional life. They remind us that mental health is not only about diagnoses or hospital wards, but also about everyday negotiations. This anthology insists that madness is not elsewhere. It is here. It is in the corridor where neighbours press their ears against the wall, in the office cubicle where panic attacks masquerade as headaches, in the mother who does not return calls.

The title, ‘Bandaged Moments’, carries a double wound. A bandage protects, but it also conceals. It is a sign of care, but also of shame. It soaks up blood and silence equally. Every story in this collection is such a bandage pulled away. Some expose scars that have long calcified. Some reveal raw flesh.

The range of the anthology is striking. Some stories trace the jagged edges of depression and anxiety; others capture the tremors of psychosis, the shadows of dementia, or the insidious weight of intergenerational trauma. The narrators are not always patients; they are also caregivers, lovers, bystanders.

What is remarkable is the stylistic variety. Some stories are starkly realist, written with journal-like immediacy. Others veer into allegory, even surrealism, pushing language beyond clinical case histories. The stories do not bend toward the expected arc of “illness-treatment-recovery”. They do not offer redemption as consolation. Instead, many end abruptly. A sentence trails off. A character remains unhealed. The illness persists.

It is not incidental that these writers are women. Women in India are taught to silence their inner tremors. Depression is mistaken for laziness, anxiety for fussiness, psychosis for family shame. “Pull yourself together” is the national anthem of Indian households. Here, the women narrate themselves — not as patients, but as storytellers. In this sense, the book joins a global continuum of feminist writing on madness, from Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to contemporary South Asian voices.

What sets the book apart from western anthologies is its claustrophobic social texture. Illness here is never private. It leaks into households, marriages, communities. One story traces the suffocating surveillance of a joint family, where every breakdown is overheard and gossiped about. Another sits inside the fluorescent coldness of a government hospital, where the patient is seen through layers of caste, gender and bureaucracy before she is seen as human.

The anthology reveals how mental illness in India is not just biological or psychological. It is infrastructural, cultural, linguistic. It is a system of silence pressed onto bodies.

The literary variety in this collection is striking. No single form can contain the complexity of mental illness. Each writer invents her own grammar. There are Confessional Voices. Some stories are intimate, almost whispering. The prose is clipped, private, like a diary someone forgot to hide. There are Fragmented Narratives. Memory collapses, time folds in on itself. In certain pieces, everyday objects tilt into menace, dreams bleed into waking. There is Clinical Realism. A different set anchors itself in sparse, exhausted realism: pill bottles, prescriptions. Their restraint captures the banality of illness, the dull grind of care. There are Allegorical Fables. A few move into mythic register, a madness appearing as a beast, a haunting, a shadow. By drawing from Indian allegorical traditions, they make mental illness both culturally familiar and strangely estranging.

I cannot pretend neutrality here. I live with bipolar disorder. I know the taste of lithium in the morning, the insomnia that unravels thought, the shame of explaining absences, therapy rooms and the weight of stigma. They were not abstractions. They were echoes. They were bandaged moments I recognised in my own life.

So when a story described sleeplessness as a shadow that refused to lie down, I stopped. Underlined it twice. Last night, I too was awake at 3 am, pacing, looking at my Whoop scores, calculating how much sleep would be enough. When another story spoke of the guilt of caregivers, I thought of my family, exhausted but loyal, pretending to be fine.

To review ‘Bandaged Moments’ is also to ask: how should one read such a book? With empathy, certainly, but also with the humility that comes from knowing literature cannot be reduced to advocacy alone. Credit must go to Sengupta and Pulugurtha not just for collecting, but for curating with intention.

India’s mental health crisis is staggering. Books cannot fix it. But they can force a cultural shift. They can unmake silence. ‘Bandaged Moments’ takes mental health out of statistics and celebrity anecdotes, and places it in lived, often ordinary, Indian realities. In doing so, it reframes madness not as aberration, but as part of the human spectrum.

Every book leaves behind an aftertaste. The aftertaste of ‘Bandaged Moments’ is not comfort, but a necessary unease. When I closed the book, I felt scraped raw. That is the point. This book is not a balm. It is not a pamphlet. It is not literature seeking approval. It is a wound. It is also dignity. It is Indian women writing their silences into speech, without permission, without apology.

Once you hear those voices, you cannot return to the comfort of ignorance.

— The reviewer is a theatre director and restaurateur