The Dove's Lament by Kirthi Jayakumar
Review: Deepti Menon “Walls whispered among themselves, each footstep carried a different tale.” There are tales that wrench the heart, and then there are tales that wrench the heart! In the aptly titled ‘The Dove’s Lament’, Kirthi Jayakumar does not write stories that comfort or please. Her stories sear the heart as she speaks of ‘Genocide’, and “war... the demon that would single-handedly make a whole community of people but a mere memory.” Her well-researched stories reach every troubled corner of the earth, from war-ravaged Rwanda and Bosnia, to child marriages in India and child trafficking in Afghanistan, from the drug market in Columbia to the unrest in Sri Lanka. The reader is left pondering over “nameless faces... that would remain silver filaments in the labyrinthine depths of the survivor’s mind.” War, anguish, loss and death weave their way through most of the stories, in language that is often heartrending, yet unimaginably beautiful. “I heard Death’s