India, Sept. 12 -- Imagine Shashi from English Vinglish being confident right from the beginning of the film, and responding to her husband's condescension. Imagine her life if she had forced change in the family that didn't value her or her skills. Shanta Gokhale's collection of 12 short stories, The Way Home, which explores marriage from a woman's perspective, provides multiple answers to questions about situations much like the one in the Sridevi film. It also explores how women may manipulate the patriarchal institution to make it meet their needs. Short story collections can be tricky. Often, a few tales shine brighter than the rest. This is not the case here. Gokhale writes with the precision of someone who has meditated long on life and writing. Her stories do not feature extraordinary events. Instead, they showcase everydayness through familiar events: a friendly reunion, a serendipitous meeting, a family secret, a power conflict between partners, learning the stories of ancestors, and so on. The opening story, In Remembrance of Times Past, challenges social perception and prejudice with its protagonist, a single septuagenarian woman golfer in shorts. The reader learns of her affairs and her one true love through the voice of her married friend, whose husband is surprised to see such a person at the golf course. The warmth between the friends shines through as much as the husband's churlishness, through anecdotes about, for instance, his annoyance at someone singing the songs of Mukesh, Mohammed Rafi and Talat Aziz in a different accent. In Ear Apart, the narrator confesses to the reader that she doesn't like the character she is going to write about. She elaborates that she might have added details to the character had she liked him. Here, the author isn't merely playing with the portrayal of characters but also with the narrative voice - which readers may or may not assume is Gokhale's own. In Swimming Pool, readers too are tested, when an elderly woman's experience is presented as a test of trust between young lovers. Here, a woman travelling from Mumbai to Pune one Sunday a month to swim in a certain pool, shows how women bargain for space and time in families that do not see them beyond their roles as wife and mother. Would a woman commute to such lengths just to swim to treat arthritis? This is the question the man asks his partner when she describes this curious woman she met on the bus. One chooses suspicion, the other chooses trust. Can such people then build the foundations of a life together? Gokhale's layered stories seem straightforward but the reader realises that they encapsulate nuances of grief, memory and loss. In The Bhikbali, the author showcases the differences in stories passed down within a family. While men know of the market aspects of an ancestor who was a businessman in the colonial era, the women speak of his aura. Written as an exchange of banter between a husband and wife married for 25 years, it is also a picture of a love that grew after marriage. Extramarital liaisons feature too. She Came To Stay presents the multiple knots in which individuals sometimes find themselves caught: "The story, which began rather unpredictably perhaps, ends exactly as you are expecting it to. Ram cannot bear to be parted from Chandani [Savitri's baby] and asks Savitri to marry him. Savitri says that would make her a bigamist and it's too much trouble divorcing Narendra, so she'd rather live in sin with Ram just as Narendra is doing with the hotel heiress in Delhi and Ram's wife is doing with her Frenchman in Paris. Ram's Vidharba blood revolts against the idea for a brief moment, but he tells it to shut up because marrying Savitri would make him a bigamist too. Sobering down, he begins to move Savitri's and Chandani's things from Anisha's bedroom to his." All the stories in the collection oscillate between marriage as a social institution and women's agency to own their lives and decisions. The authorial voice makes no judgements, and there is much empathy when characters are subject to the judgement of others. While the focus is on the women in these stories, the men are also interesting. Together, they form a picture of families with their secrets and revelations, resentments and suspicions, all presented with irony and wry humour. Gokhale's spectacular collection reminds readers that the strangest revelations can sometimes emerge from the most mundane subjects....