I Pressed My Head Against Their Bodies

The short story collection I Pressed My Head Against Their Bodies narrates attachment, search, rupture, and isolation. It is an effort to pass through and transcend the constrictions of the body, city, country, and world. In a way, this exploration inward and outward, along with rejection and denial of the deadlock, is the central conceptual theme that invisibly connects the stories. In the story Crow-head, we encounter a lonely and isolated woman on whom a crow has nested. However, the woman does not cease her efforts and struggles to free herself from this captivity and exploitation. The story The Free Sea allegorically narrates this yearning for liberation. The character in the story cuts out her head and face from her photos and sticks them onto the bodies of women in distant and free lands, as if by doing so she experiences and is freed by those lives. In the story Station Without a Station, we face another form of this search. The narrator, trapped on a broken train crossing India – a land of magic, myth, and meditation – suddenly stops fleeing, struggling, and worrying, and turns inward. This inner revelation is another aspect of that journey in the free seas. It seems for liberation, a moment of pause, reflection, and introspection is essential. The short story collection I Pressed My Head Against Their Bodies offers an artistic image of the contemporary woman – a portrayal of continuous efforts to change both outer and inner worlds.