God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.
-- Jewish proverb.

All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother
-- Abraham Lincoln

Paradise lies at the feet of mothers
-- The Koran.

Motherhood is venerated in most cultures. Pictures of beatific mothers with cherubic children abound, often in collaboration with sentimental poetry.

But there is a darker side to motherhood, and this is the focus of Shinie Antony's book of short stories, Barefoot and Pregnant. Most of the women here do not want to be mothers. Some are forced into motherhood, and some discover post-facto that it does not suit them, but there are no happy parents here.

It would be easy to dismiss these characters as dysfunctional, but that would deny the real truththat most mothers feel some ambivalence about this role, at least occasionally. One story that most new mothers will empathize with is , in which XYZ is exhausted by the continuing demands of her infant and her sleeplessness. Her husband implies that 'other women manage', and she sinks deeper into her own depression while the surrounding world blurs into the distance.

Some of the stories will be further from the experiences of the middle-class readers of this book, but are the more moving for this distance. In , Joe, a 9-year-old prostitute, sleeps on the streets of Bombay and dreams of his mother. In , a hugely pregnant beggar captures the eye of a woman in a car, but cannot hold her attention long enough to get some money before the lights change.

Jahnvi is about a young doctor who prefers work among the poor to earning a large story among the rich. Here the writing meanders somewhat, touching on the reactions of his parents to his sacrifice, and then some pages spent on the family servant who is sent to tend to his comfort. The story loses focus, but is brought sharply back to reality by the wrenching discovery of incest among his patients.

The shorter stories in the book are sometimes just a page or two, and are intense and punchy. The longer stories tend to be unfocused, with extraneous characters appearing but never really playing a part.

The longest story, Darling-Darling, covers the terrain of transsexuality. The title of the story is a literal translation of the protagonist's name, Omanakuttan. The story switches back and forth between the present day where an upstairs neighbour has died in mysterious circumstances, and the past of Omana's lonely childhood. While the story had potential and ventures into topics that are unfamiliar to most South Asian fiction, it is somewhat cliched to have transsexuality associated with such a host of unpleasant emotions and actions.

The stories are linked by the rather strange technique of having every main male character being named 'Joe', or some variation thereof (Jo short for Joginder Singh, Joe short for Joseph Ambookan...). Perhaps the intention is that the men should be seen as 'just average Joes', and perhaps I am too literal a reader, but I found this very distracting. At the beginning of each story I was wondering if this was the same Joe as in the last, and just to make it more confusing, three of the stories do actually contain the same Joe.

This would be an alarming read during the uncertainty of a first-time pregnancy, but is recommended for all others. It is an unusual set of stories about a side of motherhood that is rarely featured: sometimes moving, sometimes startling, sometimes unnerving, and sometimes tragic.

Review first published in Outlook India web edition. Reproduced here with permission of the author and Outlook's book editor

Book Description: A collection of short stories about the less commonly described sides of motherhood -- postpartum depression, poverty, pregnancy from sexual abuse, transsexuality.