The intimidating Vaishnavi pushes a buffalo, her cruel mother-in-law and husband over the edge of a ravine and spends the rest of her life punishing herself, wandering from place to place, homeless and penniless. These and other remarkable stories form this collection of sketches of ordinary women with extraordinary pasts. Compassionate without ever straying into sentimentality, Shivani's histories of the formidable women whose lives she chronicled strike a chord in our hearts even today, forty years after they were first written. A few of her short stories, inspired by these women, also form part of this brilliant translation from the Hindi by her daughter Ira Pande.