Peacocks of Instagram: Stories

In these fresh and intimate stories, Deepa Rajagopalan centres a cast of Indian women who are flawed, enterprising, and filled with desire. In the award-winning title story, an underappreciated coffee shop server haunted by her past attracts thousands of followers on social media with her peacock jewelry. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequity quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. A fiercely independent engineer does not decamp to the sidelines of an affair but takes up space, living her life as variously as possible. A foster child, orphaned in an accident directly attributable to climate change brings down her foster father, an oil lobbyist, in spectacular fashion. With an intense awareness of privilege and the lack of it, the fourteen stunning stories in explore the complexities of love, loss, and desire, and the weight they carry.