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[ESSAY] “What Lingers: On Babitha Marina Justin’s The Way Madmen Smell” by Ankush Banerjee

Babitha Marina Justin. The Way Madmen Smell, Red River Press, 2026. 149 pgs.

Noted Trivandrum-based academic, poet, and editor Babitha Marina Justin recently published her tenth book, a collection of short fiction titled The Way Madmen Smell. The stories are set in towns and hill stations across South and North East India, tangibly grounded by myths, historical events, and landscapes that serve as their backdrop.

Justin repeatedly returns to her central preoccupation: abjection, the state of being cast out or made marginal.

Through the ten short stories that comprise the collection, Justin repeatedly returns to her central preoccupation: abjection, the state of being cast out or made marginal, and what such a state does to us as human beings, psychologically, physically, and morally. In her stories, men and women are rendered abject in multifarious ways: through negotiating the hegemony of societal dogmas, coping with the unexpected turns of romantic and personal relationships, and, at times, through the unravelling of the body upon which so many of our assumptions about stable identity depend. Some of the stories take flight from these precarious positions, flitting between a difficult past and an unsettling present, bodily sensations and moral aporias. Between these poles, Justin’s stories take shape.

For instance, in “My Father’s Ghost”, we witness the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, talking to her father’s ghost, who repeatedly visits her. These exchanges open spaces for the protagonist to revisit the countless occasions on which this man abused his paternal position: through violent discipline, indifference towards his daughter’s feelings, and, most importantly, by feigning complete ignorance of the implications of his actions on his daughter’s psyche. While teaching him to use social media, the protagonist reflects, “I felt exhausted after acting out every word I had to say” (p. 139).

The story historicises the protagonist’s wretchedness, which initially stems from the dread of physical abuse experienced in childhood (the father canes her for a minor infraction), but later transmutes into the unhealed emotional wounds of adulthood (he frequently churned “up a tumultuous wave of guilt” within her). The story shows that psychological degradation is not a permanent condition but one that intensifies over time if left unchecked, levying incalculable emotional costs upon a person. In the end, the protagonist gives away all her dead father’s belongings to a scrap dealer, thereby opening her “doors and windows, letting in fresh air” (p. 144).

Curiously, the story offers reprieve from the dynamic of abuse by removing the father from the frame through the death motif, rather than by correcting the antinomies that produced the abuse, namely, abusive, emotionally stunted paternal masculinity masquerading as care. Does the text wish us to believe that problematic paternal masculinity can only be resolved through death, one wonders? I felt the point of the story was not so much to stage a resolution as to foreground the psychological aftereffects of the accumulation of quotidian, yet substantial, emotional abuse.

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This dynamic is discernible in other stories as well: helpless protagonists who do not narrate tales of spectacular victory after trauma, nor radically transform the conditions that undergird their disempowered states. Instead, they, and their stories, dwell within inherently difficult positions without resolving their complexity.

In “Tengchi”, a single mother who sells her second, illegitimate newborn to feed the rest of her family finds solace, though not redemption, in the company of another woman who has chosen career aspirations over motherhood, having left her own newborn with her in-laws in another city.

Justin’s stories obliquely achieve what Greek tragedy once did.

In short, there are, for the most part, no “happily ever afters” in Justin’s stories. This does not diminish their narrative power; indeed, quite the contrary. Justin’s stories obliquely achieve what Greek tragedy once did: employing the spectacle of drama to showcase intense suffering, which induces cathartic relief in the audience and thereby brings them closer to understanding the “human condition” and their own vulnerabilities. Though catharsis in Justin’s stories is not redemptive in the conventional sense, it offers the specific relief of having looked at something difficult and realised one is not in the subject’s position; through the sharpness of her imagery, Justin ensures that such relief does not equate with comfort (more on this). The stories stage this dynamic wonderfully well, both stylistically and thematically. But to understand this, we must first understand how Justin offers a powerful, reparative reimagining of abjection in her work.

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In Kristeva’s formulation, the abject threatens the natural order by collapsing the boundary between the self and the non-self, that which it is not. Justin’s fiction compels us to rethink the difficult relationship between the subject and its opposite, the non-self, or the abject. Significantly, the stories compel us to reconsider perspectives not from the subject’s point of view but from that of the subject’s other, the abject’s.

For several reasons, this is not an easy task for a fiction writer. Firstly, the stories risk collapsing into black and white narratives of pity, victimhood, jingoistic resilience, or predictable tragedy. More problematically, by successfully resuscitating the abject from its abject position, the story risks contradicting its own premise rather than strengthening it. Crucially, Justin’s stories elude both these risks, fundamentally because they do not rush to resolve tensions, nor do they attempt to resuscitate the protagonist or speaker (as seen in “Tengchi”). Rather, Justin’s style of lingering on her scenes, focusing intensely on the abject for extended periods, causes the minutiae of detail to burn slowly into the reader’s psyche. For instance, the image below bites in a way difficult to shrug off: “my husband scooped a handful of chilli paste and dabbed it on the child’s eye” (from “Sixty-five”, p. 128).

Such images form part of scenes reminiscent of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s celebrated eighteen-minute takes.

Such images form part of scenes reminiscent of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s celebrated eighteen-minute takes, which train the frame on their subject, allowing details to sink into the audience’s psyche. In Justin’s stories, a strategy of creating shared moral discomfort collapses the boundary between the abject and the subject, the reader. Such a boundary collapse, staged through Justin’s vivid, poetic lines, immanently produces resistance from the abject’s position rather than from outside the story’s frame.

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An important detail about Justin’s background is directly relevant here. Justin has written three volumes of poetry, the most recent of which, Forty Shades of Brown (Poetrywala, 2023), explored the myriad shades of desire. Her poetic prowess lends her lines an inordinately powerful, vivid quality. Consider this scene: “To my disgust, I saw he had even taken off the red handkerchief which cinched his crotch. I nearly retched seeing the dark demons coiled on his crotch” (from “Nangu’s Daughter”, p. 39).

“Dark demons coiled on his crotch” transforms visceral discomfort into visceral poetry, a move only a poet turned fiction writer would attempt. Such sharp stylistic choices charge scenes with both emotional depth and concrete detail at once. The simultaneous operation of these two facets explains why, in some of the stories, resisting one’s own disempowerment is not merely redemptive. The damage to the self is irreversible. But this does not mean that one should not resist, only that the outcomes of resistance cannot be predicted beforehand.

To illustrate, in “The Last Bullock Cart in Town”, we meet Kesavan, a Dalit who drives a bullock cart, transporting a schoolgirl, Rati, to school when she misses her school transport. With time, Rati and Kesavan grow fond of each other, and Rati comes to prefer missing the school transport in favour of riding in Kesavan’s bullock cart. Kesavan narrates how he dropped out of school because of trenchant caste-based abuse from both peers and teachers. In one recollection, he describes how his uniform was torn and he was dragged through mud and urine. Kesavan, though, has survived to tell the tale: “I survived, I worked hard, bought two bulls, built a house, got married” (p. 99). However, the local Municipality had outlawed the use of bullock carts, and soon Kesavan would have to let his go; this would also put an end to Rati’s bullock-cart rides, a prospect that makes her sad. The story ends with Kesavan giving her some cherries that “seem to mirror a new world, nudging her to move on”.

In such a gesture, the text carries ephemeral traces of hope for a future in which children like Rati grow up to be conscientious citizens; more importantly, it also subtly signals that “moving on” is an avenue open only to Rati, owing to her class and caste position, while for Kesavan the “new world” will likely resemble the old. Hence, echoing Muñoz’s work on ephemera as evidence, the text offers hope as a partial, emotional mechanism that tempers the egregious, historical trajectory of caste injustice, while also hinting at how material asymmetries, premised on caste and class, will continue to produce precarity concealed by the presumably false consciousness of hope. There are no easy answers, no easy solutions.

Justin’s stories show that when a text lingers long enough on the abject, it simultaneously reinforces the very conditions that produced abjection and opens new ways of being and seeing. Like Tarr, Justin’s prose asks us to keep looking, despite the discomfort, and in that sustained engagement, something opens.

^{How to cite: Banerjee, Ankush. “What Lingers: On Babitha Marina Justin’s The Way Madmen Smell.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Jul. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/07/02/madmen.}

Ankush Banerjee‘s recent publications include his second book of poems, Field Notes on Kindness (Red River Press, 2025); an Occasional Paper for the Observer Research Foundation on civil-military fusion in armed forces education (November 2025); and a short story titled “Hero” in Collateral, a magazine that examines the aftereffects of violent conflict (April 2026). He is a masculinity studies research scholar whose doctoral research examines non-normative masculinity in contemporary Indian fiction. [All contributions by Ankush Banerjee.]