Dear Reader,A frequent visitor to the mountains would be familiar with the sight of labourers toiling on the hillsides, repairing roads. If you happen to pass them when they are having a break between work, you might find them sitting on their haunches around a fire and chatting, having lunch from small dabbas and chai from tin cups, and sometimes catching a wink by the culvert, under a makeshift “tent” consisting of an umbrella with a cardigan or a shawl thrown over it. While the workforce has men, women, and children (children are there, invariably), the women fascinate me.I marvel at the way they manage to look stylish and neat—in shirts worn over the sari, oiled hair, bangled hands, painted nails, pretty bindi—while doing heavy work like breaking stones or carrying huge loads on their heads. When they gather for tea or tiffin—gossiping, giggling, smoking beedi—they look like a solidarity, creating among themselves a space of safety. What stories do they carry in them, I wonder, as I enter and exit their world fleetingly as a tourist in the mountains. I wish I could peer into their inner lives, read their dreams, think the thoughts that run through their minds when they sit alone, away from the chatter.Beneath Magnolia Skies: Writings from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills, edited by Mona Chettri and Prava Rai, gave me the chance to do precisely this. In this book, ordinary women from the mountains narrate their lives, speaking of hardship, discriminations, abuse, abandonment, migration, and minuscule joys. Reading them, you realise why an old curse from the foothills wishes upon a woman the life of a wife in the hills. “A Letter to Baari: On Memories, Migration and Relationships” by Avinam Manger is written in the form of a letter to baari (mother’s elder sister). It vibrates against the myth that the elderly woman managing the household, looking after children, doing extra work outside the house to supplement the family income does everything uncomplainingly and easily, tapping into some secret reserve of selfless love and happiness. The interlocutor asks Baari the vital question, “Do you have enough choices?”There are more questions, and they get unexpected answers. “Baari, I must ask you—when was the last time you enjoyed sound sleep? Do you get enough sleep to prepare you for the next day?... I recall you saying, ‘As soon as I rest my head on my pillows, dreams haunt me. The miserable never find happiness in their dreams. They never get sound sleep.’ When I asked you why, you said that even in your dreams you find yourself performing the same strenuous work repetitively.” Hitaishi Gautam’s poem, “My Mother Doesn’t Clip her Nails”, foregrounds yet another elderly woman, a mother, who has forgotten how to care for herself after spending a lifetime caring for others. When the daughter asks the mother why her nails are crooked, she says that these are the hands of someone one who has worked hard, with stones and manure, throughout her life. Pieces like these remind one of what the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said in her seminal book, The Second Sex, way back in 1949: “Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.”Most of the pieces bring in intergenerational perspectives to examine what has changed. Women today, unlike women from earlier generations, have the option to study and prepare for an independent life. But here too there is a caveat. “Growing up in the Eastern/ Himalayas,/ we are subjected/ to ‘balance’./ Women are encouraged to study/ but at the same time,/ expected to/ perform the household chores. Maintain balance,” says the ironic voice of the poem, “Sharnu Ra Parnu”, by Lungmying Lepcha.Other entries expand the circle of reference by talking not just of women who belong to the hills by birth but also of those who have migrated there. The issue of “outsiders” is especially relevant in the context of the Darjeeling hills since the Gorkhaland agitation of the 1980s (the scars of which still mar the collective consciousness of a generation) tried to create a separate State for the Nepali-speaking Gorkha people of the region. The movement led to the massacre of hundreds, both from the hills and the plains. A piece like “Navigating My Identity as a Pahare Bengali” by Madhusree Goswami, who is a Nepali-speaking Bengali whose family had settled in Kurseong generations ago, hits at the basis of identity politics by asking how much and how long it takes for one to be considered a “local”, with the right to belong. An important part of the hill population consists of tea-garden workers, many of whom have converged in Darjeeling and Sikkim from Nepal and the plains of India. The photo essay “Hath ko Chiya: A Quiet Resistance”, by Ruchi Dyeksang and Bibhusha Rai, documents the lives of workers who have stitched their lives back together after the closure of the gardens by selling hand-rolled tea sourced from the now dysfunctional tea estates. It is a symbolic rebellion, since they got barely any compensation when the owners packed up and left one fine day.Tea-garden workers are again the protagonists of the story, “Over the Hills and Far Away”, by Yoshay Lama Lindblom, easily one of the best pieces in the volume. It presents a picture that shatters the touristy image of tea gardens as idyllic spaces draped in sunshine and peace. In the story, the daughter of a tea garden worker is saved from violation by an unexplained force. The next day, the abuser is found dead, floating in a pond.In real life, of course, a lone young woman in the dimly-lit, secluded stretches of the gardens at night is not likely get any help if she is attacked. The story highlights an oft-ignored reality of the hills—the high incidence of crimes against women and non-cis men, including human trafficking, in the tea gardens. Such incidents were common even when the gardens were in good financial health, sustained by the patriarchal belief that most of the garden workers, being poor migrants, were “available” for quick sex. The crimes increased after the closures as the gardens became unsupervised spaces and the unemployed workers, driven by poverty and hunger, were forced to take up sex work.I can go on about Beneath Magnolia Skies, but this is not a review. I liked reading the book because it gave me an insiders’ view of the region I have visited several times as a tourist and a journalist. Here, the social profile of the contributors is important: while most of them are published writers or academics, there are also amateurs—homemakers or schoolteachers—who are experimenting with storytelling to reveal things left unsaid by mainstream narratives.The writers might not be the women we see breaking stones on roadsides, but they come close, often just one generation removed from the workers who hold the stories in their heart, not having the capacity or the inclination to write them down. In this, the pieces in Beneath Magnolia Skies are as authentic as they get, the written equivalent to a documentary film on the daily lives of hill women.Rohini Mokashi-Punekar points out in her review of Lapbah: Stories from the North-East, Volume I and II that “The north-eastern region today seems poised to dominate the literary world of India. Not only are English translations of works written in regional tongues becoming available now, but a large number of writers who use English for their creative expression, are also becoming more visible.” This is truly a reason to celebrate: the hill States of India, particularly those in the eastern and north-eastern Himalayas, have long been neglected, and it is high time that the historic imbalance is corrected. Since stories are capable of forging an immediate and lasting connection, the value of volumes like Lapbah or Beneath Magnolia Skies cannot be gainsaid. Read Mokashi-Punekar’s review of Lapbah here.Another noteworthy read in this issue is Ravikant Kisana’s review of Manu Joseph’s latest book, Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us. The author of Meet the Savarnas, Kisana writes a fair critique, deftly pointing out the gaps in the book’s argument. “In imagining the ‘poor’ as only deprived, Manu’s understanding flattens their innate understanding of social aspirations and political expectations. While he sees that political contract exists differently for the ‘poor’ and even notes that it is rooted in ‘identity’, he glosses over the ‘why’. It is almost as if his gaze is missing something, as if he is observing the symptoms but cannot diagnose the disease” (read the full review here). The reason is perhaps obvious: Joseph doesn’t belong to the class he writes so pithily about.If India runs on the forbearance of its poor, as Joseph holds, then it is best to let the poor explain why. Their accounts might not be Instagram-friendly or lit fest-worthy, but their truth value would be high. This is also why books like Beneath Magnolia Skies are important. They do academics, social scientists, and policy-makers (if they care to listen) a favour by representing the raw, unedited voices of their subjects. As such, they are chastening in their revelations. Meet you with more stories soon. Till then,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS