Published in Issue 64.1: Winter 2025
You can purchase our Winter issue here
Why We Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review Assistant Editor Hank Hietala on why he recommended “My Left Hand, Unholy” by Sanjana Thakur.
When I first read “My Left Hand, Unholy,” I was struck by how the text moves through time. From the second paragraph on, Sanjana Thakur jettisons the tidy linearity of many short stories for something more tangled, where the narration toggles back and forth between past and present. In lesser hands, this structure could become needlessly confounding, but Thakur has good reason to use it. Pri, the narrator, is freighted with history. The past comes back to her in flickers and skips, like sunlight pulsing between trees. Rather than recounting the birth of Pri’s child in a neat expository section, time-stamped and delivered, Thakur cunningly only gives us backstory in parts.
There is nothing frivolous in these pages. Even the details that might seem random are anything but: a doll metaphor becomes a harkening back to childhood; a “yo mama” joke curdles into tragedy; water and milk imagery lap around the edges of the page, mixing the renewal of birth and the sacred rites of death. “My Left Hand, Unholy” is packed full of beautiful descriptions, but the structure never collapses under them. This is to Thakur’s credit as a stylist. To her narrator a father is “a foreign object lodged inside my body like a kidney stone,” while a mother’s mouth opens “like the maw of a wild boar.” (I won’t spoil any more of these prose-level delights, but they abound.)
What I love most about this story—and the main reason I passed it along to our fiction editor, hoping she would agree to publish it—is Thakur’s reckoning with death. In “My Left Hand, Unholy,” death is the organizing principle: family life, sexual expression, and gender dynamics are oriented around it. Even when the narrator recounts the births of herself and her child, she is addressing her family’s mortality. There is no shirking in these pages, no averting of the eyes from the cemetery gates. Above all, Thakur is attuned to the fluctuations of grief and the uneven distribution of its burdens. As she writes, “Death is a woman’s duty—men are not primary mourners.”
—
My father’s life has always been peripheral to mine. What he wants, who he is, who he has loved––none of those things has ever made a difference. He is a foreign object lodged inside my body like a kidney stone. I have spent years trying to flush him out.
Her life, though, it matters. I hope I am my mother’s child. I see it in the way we gave birth. I’ve watched the VCR tapes of her in Breach Candy Hospital, 1989. She had a private room, pear-green walls. Her mother held her right hand tightly. A nurse wiped her sweaty forehead with a rag soaked in warm water. Her mouth opened up like the maw of a wild boar, her eyes wide and white, but she wasn’t afraid. She looked enraged.
The video of me giving birth is on my husband’s phone. Also in Breach Candy Hospital, though by then they had repainted the maternity ward a pale eggshell blue. My mother held my right hand like her mother had held hers. A nurse instructed my husband to dip a washcloth in a bowl of warm water, wring it out, and pat the sweat off my brows. He fed me ice and did as he was told. He said he loved me and he was sorry. The phone, resting against a vinyl seat back to my left, captured everything. I shit myself, and labored, and made the same face Mumma had on the final push. My mouth slackened, I drooled out the side of it. We gave birth angry, both of us. Neither of us cried.
I wonder sometimes if my daughter, born after fourteen hours of labor, bloody and early and scabbed with vernix, will give birth the same way. She is eight months now. Already I am thinking of who will come next, how it will hurt.
***
Mumma dies next to me in the early hours, as peaceful as dying can be. I wake and it’s raining outside. I can’t remember my dreams but I think they were good. I am on my back, limbs starfishing like a child’s. My left hand flung against her stomach. I turn to my side and there she is, even fairer and lovelier now she has stopped breathing. Eyes closed like a doll. So pretty, a mother to be proud of. The wispy baby curls sprouting from her hairline flutter each time the fan pushes air in our direction. I press my knuckles against her bare neck and find no pulse. She is still warm.
I lie in bed for a while, look at her and look out the window. There is no sunrise, only the appearance of diffuse light, lazy and pale between rain clouds. We are high up, on the thirteenth floor of my parents’ apartment building, and the pigeons are cooing from their nest atop the window A/C unit. How cruel of her to die on the weekend, while I am visiting. Raindrops keep plinking against the mosquito net and I keep falling back asleep.
I wake again only when Nisa starts to cry. I lift her from the white slatted cot by the window and take her to bed. I pull down my nightie to feed her, turned away from Mumma. She’s a good eater. I was too, Mumma says. She’s always been proud of that, as though it was her milk in particular that was so good, so irresistible, I couldn’t help but suck. I think it was just me, my gluttony, even as a baby. I’ve never known self-control. Now, with Nisa, I don’t think it’s my milk. I think it’s her and I resent how much she wants to take from me.
Nisa prefers my right breast to my left, so they’re lopsided. Both are furred and big, and as she sucks, I think of the two boys in eighth grade who waited for me to come out of the girls’ bathroom at recess. They wouldn’t let me pass until I answered their question: “What’s brown and hairy and has milk inside?” “A coconut,” I tried, and they laughed and laughed. They grabbed my breasts and squeezed but no milk came out then. It was terrifying. It was thrilling, too. No boy had ever wanted to touch me before.
I think about Nisa’s father. He’s a good man who loves me and loves her. When she finishes I burp her and pull down her Hello Kitty footie pajamas to change her wet diaper. I clean her and set her back down to sleep. She’s a deep sleeper once you get her down, small mouth like a jellyfish puffing open and closed. I try to touch the weather. I try to cry. I screw up my face the way Nisa does, eyes nearly closed, forehead scrunched, nostrils flaring. I think about sad things. I think about my mother, dead, and when that doesn’t work, I think about how I am still fat from the pregnancy. Then finally, eyes leaking, I go out and wake everyone up.
Read more by purchasing our Winter 2025 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Sanjana Thakur is a writer from Mumbai, India. She is the 2024 winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The Rumpus, and The Southampton Review. Her poetry has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Booth, and Pigeon Pages. Sanjana is a graduate of UT-Austin’s New Writers Project and Wellesley College.
