Futility and Betrayal in Shashi Bhat’s Death by a Thousand Cuts
What counts as a dealbreaker in modern dating? Would I look better with lighter eyes? How many of us crave belonging? And what do we do when we are failed by those we love?
The above questions capture a few of the concerns in British Columbia-based author Shashi Bhat’s third book and first short story collection, Death by a Thousand Cuts, which follows women with intense interiorities struggling with different aspects of daily life, such as a frugal job searcher who is also looking for love, and a distressed writer who feels like her life has been stolen when her ex uses their relationship as the basis of a novel. The stories sometimes integrate a speculative element, including the titular story, which revolves around a futuristic surgery to change eye colour, and “Giantess,” which follows a giantess working at a library. For the most part, the protagonists are modern Brown women in their 20s and early 30s, living in or near Vancouver. The protagonists shift but maintain an integrity of voice: elegant, incisive, dry, witty. They are usually frugal but also come from wealth. They often feel like they’ve just stepped out of an Austen novel and into the modern day; not so much in their use of language or morals, but in a disciplinary comportment, a tight sense of being which evokes the pages of classic romantic fiction.
The protagonists shift but maintain an integrity of voice: elegant, incisive, dry, witty.
“Dealbreaker,” the collection’s first story, introduces the slow-building dread of a familiar nightmare. The narrative follows Asha as she matches on a dating app with an unnamed elementary school art teacher and evaluates their connection over the course of two dates. Bhat explores the role of consent in modern dating with a climactic scene where tickling becomes an act of violence in the front seat of a Toyota Corolla, and the reader is left to grapple with the strangeness of the violation as well as the smaller aggressions that preceded it: coercing Asha to come to his home, pushing her to drink, and drinking and driving. The intermingling of banality with horror in this first story sets the tone for what comes next.
The title story highlights the mundane strength of Bhat’s worlding. “Death by a Thousand Cuts” follows a college-age couple who poke and prod at each other’s differences while the reader watches. It becomes apparent quite quickly that the title is a reference to microaggressions, which are delivered primarily by the narrator’s white boyfriend who can’t seem to help repeating his preference for blue eyes. The narrator weighs the pros and cons of their relationship, passively compares her brown eyes to the distaste she feels toward his webbed toes, and relieves her resentment through the use of Photoshop, pulling up photos of them together and replacing her boyfriend with celebrity comedian Hasan Minhaj. The mysterious technological shadow of LŪMEN—a company offering surgery to change your natural eye colour that the narrator stumbles across on the internet—hangs over the story. The protagonist and her boyfriend break up, but the implications linger as she continues to wonder what she would choose if given the option to go under the knife, a seed of doubt only digging deeper with time.
The story’s threads are loosely woven, reflecting Bhat’s tendency to stick to the smaller details, but the end offers a simple conclusion: your doctor will betray you, just like your body.
“Chicken and Egg” faces the heavy truths of healthcare advocacy. The only story in the collection written in direct address, it positions the reader in the protagonist’s perspective through second-person narration. “It’s a grey, early morning and your body is cobra-posed, palms pressed down on the bedroom carpet,” it begins. The story chronicles the narrator’s experience visiting her family physician over and over to try to seek help as she progressively loses more and more of her hair. The question of what came first, the chicken or the egg, could be one of many: the loss or the stress? The stress or the neglect? The nightmarish quality of the narrator’s anxiety is tied to how her hair represents not only beauty but also youth and a sense of control. Her inner vulnerability is mirrored in the soft patches of her head that are revealed. The story culminates with the narrator encountering her ex-boyfriend at a store and facing another nightmare: he sees her and she’s changed so much—for the worse—that he doesn’t recognize her. The story’s threads are loosely woven, reflecting Bhat’s tendency to stick to the smaller details, but the end offers a simple conclusion: your doctor will betray you, just like your body.
The collection’s best and longest story, “What You Can Live Without,” comes next. Recently laid off, Aarthi is bored, counting coins, talking to her parents about her prospects: both romantic and work-related. While her parents try to set her up, offering her an envelope of “eligible Indian men” and publishing an ad with her photo in a local magazine, Aarthi tries online dating. “Aarthi began framing it as a race,” we learn, “she had to find somebody on her own before being guilted into a relationship.” In this context she meets an intensely frugal man named John. They share an obvious chemistry and sense of humour. They bond over their love for cheap dates—“free events, walks, parks, window shopping, the occasional happy hour where they’d each pay for what they ate or drank”—and we understand that John is financially well-off but exacting, meticulously balancing what he receives with what he gives, and saving money wherever possible. It becomes clear that this style of living feels stingy to Aarthi, a concern that begins to influence her attraction. She watches her parents practice a very different kind of love.
The deeper lesson here is on the relational dynamics of community and the influence of the love we grow up with on the choices we make about the love we want.
The crux of this story is the question of the usefulness of generosity. We arrive at Aarthi and John’s inevitable breakup scene—a feature of every love story in the collection—after an intense sexual interaction, coded in all of the textures of the financial landscape built between them. Aarthi admits that the sex felt like “something he hadn’t earned.” Shortly after their breakup, she decides to move back in with her parents. The story feels like an ode to return: from the allegory of money as love to the contrast between modern dating and arranged marriage, Aarthi chooses, in the end, to return to the love of her family. The deeper lesson here is on the relational dynamics of community and the influence of the love we grow up with on the choices we make about the love we want. The title is a delightful addendum: John’s love was something that Aarthi could live without.
Rarely does Bhat offer relief from the difficult realities of the world, a choice that I respect as a reader, even as it weighs on me.
Over and over, women choose to remain alone. The stories often end on a depressing note, but the collection is softened by the beauty of the language, which makes the ordinary moments gleam. Rarely does Bhat offer relief from the difficult realities of the world, a choice that I respect as a reader, even as it weighs on me. In “Giantess,” the protagonist is occupied by her perpetual loneliness. She is a social outsider; she almost belongs and is quietly desperate to do so. When she is finally offered an opportunity to introduce a speaker at a prestigious library event, her attempts to fit in are thwarted when she is stuck in the elevator on the way to the function. The final scene of the story finds her crawling up the elevator shaft using her fantastical strength. As a reader, I cringed and rejoiced at her devolving back into herself. Repeatedly, Bhat uses a heavy-handed metaphor to deliver an interesting scenic message, in this case about the feeling of being marginalized for who you are.
Bhat often writes characters who are struggling with confrontation, and choose to act only when they’ve been pushed too far.
The final two stories of the collection, “Her Ex Writes a Novel” and “Am I the Asshole?” are kindred to the very first story, “Dealbreaker,” in that they are about violation. In the first, the breach is emotional and interpersonal; in the second, sexual and bodily. In “Her Ex Writes a Novel,” a writer discovers her identity has been shoddily stolen by an ex-boyfriend for his new novel. In her fury, the unnamed narrator relives their relationship through her memories, often mulling and despairing at length about her situation. The writerly debate of appropriation is well-represented, as the story explores how we deal with public betrayals and how much we are allowed to take from life as plot. However, the note the story ends on feels stifled (she sends her ex a sharply-worded email and blocks him on all platforms). The protagonist displays a lack of emotional intelligence that feels surprising. Her decision evokes an overarching critique: Bhat often writes characters who are struggling with confrontation, and choose to act only when they’ve been pushed too far. As a result, they are often preoccupied with moralizing on their situations, rather than holding any accountability; perhaps an apt choice for such a fatalistic collection. It may be that, by this point, I felt worn thin by the comprehensive pessimism.
The betrayal that is central to this final story could rattle even the most seasoned reader.
“Am I the Asshole?” was the most jarring story for its sudden turn, delivering a harrowing portrayal of sexual assault in an everyday context. Consent, and the deep implications of daily actions, are explored through an oversight: Prish’s boyfriend, Mike, won’t stop grabbing her breasts randomly, so she turns to Reddit, posting in the “Am I The Asshole” forum to ask for advice. When Mike finds the thread online, he doesn’t bring it up, but the realization that he has crossed Prish’s boundaries leads him to reveal that he committed an act of sexual violence in the past. The horror and simplicity of this realization is another anxious nightmare come to life, exacerbated by the precise detail with which Bhat catalogues the past encounter. The reader relives the experience through Mike’s memory, through Prish’s perspective as she learns this about her partner and considers what to do, and finally—in a diluted, dreamy final paragraph—through the perspective of the woman that Mike assaulted. The betrayal that is central to this final story could rattle even the most seasoned reader. The message that Bhat leaves us with at the end of the collection is simple, heartbreaking, and very much in the register of the stories she has shared thus far: do we really know the people that we love? Do we want to?
