Between the Lines and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by Ashita, one of Malayalam’s finest women writers. She is widely recognized as an author who initiated themes which came to be handled in bolder and more politicized terms by explicitly anti-patriarchal writing in Malayalam in the 1990s and thereafter. Ashita’s stories are unique for their extreme economy of words that communicate brilliantly the claustrophobic nature of confined domestic spaces in which educated women in Kerala found themselves, from which there was seemingly no escape. Her writing does not merely talk about the oppressiveness of confinement, rather it communicates the experience of silence, repression, and sheer boredom, and transports the reader into that dark, still world within the four walls of the respectable middle-class home in which everyone was expected to be happy and contended.