Black Arts & Culture Feature:
Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Through the Trapdoor
By Kavita Ivy Nandan
Papel Publishing
ISBN 978-1-764154-1-7, Paperback, Aug 2025
Short story collections are due a resurgence. Short fiction is perfect for the modern attention span, and when a short story is done well it presents a complete world that can be enjoyed in a single sitting. Like any good collection, whether that be poetry or essays or stories, the stories themselves build on one another and gain new meanings from proximity, so that the book as a whole often has a overall theme or impact which is greater than the sum of its parts. This is certainly the case in Kavita Ivy Nandan’s Through the Trap Door, The book presents a series of eleven stories written around the themes of migration and family. Drawing on Nandan’s own background, the stories focus on India, Fiji and Australia, exploring female desire, racism, nostalgia, longing and identity in ways that are both powerfully depicted and interwoven. The book is enriched with greyscale illustrations by Harold Legaspi, which does give the work a YA feel, and I do think it would be suitable for an older YA reader – maybe fifteen +, though also perfectly geared to an adult reader.
The stories often work towards the Joycean ephipany – a sudden transition point or moments when a long-held perception shifts, often in the midst of ordinary circumstances. This is immediatley apparently in the first story “A is for Apple” in which the smaller, less-fortunate brother turns the tide on his brother by evoking their schoolboy past:
As Vinod was leaving through the gate, he turned around and shouted, ‘Have an apple on me, bro!’ Vinod had left the bag of apples next to his seat in the waiting room. He might have been unhealthy, but he was robust enough to be obnoxious. It dawned on Pramod that perhaps he had been arrogant enough to feel sorry for his brother for so long. Had he misjudged Vinod’s experience of migration because of those first hard years and his own guilt?” (8)
Throughout the stories, a range of family members—siblings, cousins, uncles, parents and grandparents meet up, some after long-standing feuds, some during family reunions, and some simply by proximity. In nearly all of the stories there is often a stark contrast between the protagonist’s inner life or experience of the situation and their outer expression, the norms of their situations undermined with dramatic irony. Nandan handles this contrast with perfectly subtlety, not leading the reader but allowing the themes of empowerment, to emerge organically. A good example of this is the story of a cousin whose lonely marriage fades into the background when she begins growing orchids and finds a like-minded gardener:
He noticed her hands first. His wife’s were soft, manicured, painted. Hers were like builder’s hands – nails broken, skin pierced, and he thought he could see a splinter in the palm of the left hand. Instead of being put off, Mr Singh was entranced. He thought there was nothing more beautiful than a pair of useful hands. Hands that worked, that created something. (“The Orchid Lovers, 22)
Like many of the stories in the book, this ne has the slightest touch of magic realism. The orchid they develop feel somewhat supernatural. Again, Nandan handles this subtly, with just enough of a hint for us to look a little more closely at what feels familiar and mundane to see the shimmering mystery that is always present. There are similar hints in a big family reunion where Arjun travels from Sydney to Goa, drawn by an inexplicable desire to connect that comes on him suddenly, the epiphany again:
The sky’s spectacular clarity unnerved him, and a feeling of loneliness reawakened in his heart. It had been a decade since he had gone back to the country of his birth. Then, whether vision or visitation, he swore he saw his long-dead grandmother, gesturing North-West with her fleshless finger from heaven. Arjun booked his flight from Sydney to Goa. (“The Family Circle”, 28)
The work is rich with sensory detail like the foods of India – curries, Gulab Jamuns, sugarcane juice and a variety of teas, the scents and smells of the different settings that the characters move through, as well as a series of artefacts that function as both anchors to a visceral world and as synecdoche, a photograph of a yellow bungalow that stands for colonialism, the torn piece of fabric from a red sari that stands for modern slavery and defilement, a hot water bottle that stands for a home that can never be returned to:
Perhaps weather and temperature were not absent in our history, nor in our identity. They were not the surface of things but signalled what lay below. (“In Hot Water”, 62)
Through the Trapdoor is full of such vivid characterisation, engaging dialogue and enjoyable plotlines around overbearing ambitions, competitive siblings, domineering parents, and the difficulty of intermarriage, that its easy to miss how powerful the statements these pieces make, but there is a strong political current that runs through the work, engaging, subtly of course as is Nandan’s way, with misogyny, binary thinking, colonialism and racism. This is particularly present in the final piece, a culmination of many of the book’s themes, reminding us that there are always layers of culture beneath the surface, and that nothing is one thing only:
They journeyed into the heart of whiteness, their presence bringing colour, briefly, to the country that was already full of colour before any of them had arrived. (“Heart of Whiteness”, 98)
Through the Trapdoor is a delightful book from an author who has a deep understanding of the short story form.
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