Femme Fatale

New Indian Express

21-05-2025

Shinie Antony, known for her novella The Girl Who Couldn't Love (Speaking Tiger; ₹299), is a figure ubiquitous in Bengaluru's literary circuits. Through lyrical and deft prose, her work epitomises a struggle between bitterness and bereavement, primarily through first-person narratives. Recently, the author discussed three of her books: Can't (Speaking Tiger; ₹350), Eden Abandoned (Hachette India; ₹499), and Hell Hath No Fury (Hachette India; ₹599).
A perfunctory glance at Antony's Google page would reveal that all three aforementioned books, along with ExObjects, an anthology Antony edited with AT Boyle, released in 2024. What might seem as a burst of prolific literary output, according to Antony, is incidental. She remarks, 'That is purely accidental. The two anthologies – Hell Hath No Fury and ExObjects – were compiled with themes of revenge and grief, respectively, and the writers were just terrific. The novella Can't had been written just before Covid, hence, in the queue longer; meanwhile, Eden Abandoned, a monologue by Adam's first wife, Lilith, happened.'
In the jilted lover of Can't , the story of the forgotten Lilith, and the stories of Hell Hath no Fury (edited by Antony), the reader encounters women who are righteous in their ire. It is both implied and understood that it is crucial to not only write stories of women whose anger is justified, but also excavate such stories from the common mythos, like that of Lilith's. Antony concurs, adding, 'Gender is the real religion, with women being secondary citizens all over the world, right from the start. In mythology, it is important to exhume the women, as they were all originally written by men. 'Bad women' give everyone the heebie-jeebies; and the disrespect that society accords them – they zing it right back. The damned, in a way, are free to be themselves. They have nothing left to lose. There is nothing more liberating than the world thinking the worst of you.'
'This Little Heart of Mine', Antony's authorial contribution in the short-story anthology that is Hell Hath No Fury, centres around a student narrator, revealed at the outset as the victim of an ongoing rape. As in the entire corpus of her work, there is a deliberate insistence on imagery and simile, arguably acting as the primary narrative vehicle. Likening the narrator's thighs to falling 'wings' also hints at an inverted reference to WB Yeats' 'Leda and the Swan'. As Antony shares, 'I once read that metaphors and similes come from an unsound mind. Maybe that's true. The thighs in 'This Little Heart of Mine' fall like dead wings, because she cannot move, literally. Leda too, perhaps, had no say in the matter. A girl can't escape, not from Zeus.'
Like the religious refashioning of Lilith casts her as demonic and monstrous, patriarchal contemporaneity stands to project the same accusation on the other 'bad women' that exist out of Antony's nib as well. As she shares, even (or especially) as children, it is important to read, to persist, and to document. 'What is lost in this whole good girl/bad girl debate is the human element. Who we are as opposed to who we are told to be. Modern-day Indian children's books already include this theme. Young desi heroines come fitted with fangs,' she asserts.