If you’ve ever wondered what histories slip through the cracks of mainstream publishing, The Unrepentant by Sharmini Aphrodite is a good answer. These fourteen stories, published by New York City-based indie press Gaudy Boy, open a window into Malaysia’s past that feels both intimate and startlingly new. Across the collection, Aphrodite moves through worlds ranging from Tamil plantation lore to struggles of insurgents, from workers juggling life between Singapore and Malaysia to the forced exile of communists, all against the tense backdrop of the Second Malayan Emergency. We enter the collection knowing little of her deeper historical investigations and yet we are swept immediately into the first story’s confident, unsettling beauty.Other histories, other landscapesThe first story, “The Light of God,” almost reads like a thriller. The milieu is unfamiliar, so is the history, yet the characters are vividly present, their desires and fears anchoring you amid a village wedged between a dense, pressing jungle and the sea. Her prose carries you forward, each sentence a careful step through the undergrowth, revealing the shape of place and history just enough to keep you moving, alert, enthralled. The tone is set. There is thwarted ambition, a disappearance, a quiet reckoning and grief. By the end of this first story, a sense of place and history begins to emerge. You begin to understand that before there was Malaysia, there were other histories, other landscapes, and that the writer seems determined to challenge the easy habit of seeing Malaysia in relation to Singapore.From the second story onward, Aphrodite’s ambition becomes unmistakable. “A man has died,” it opens. In this story, more Malay words appear, historical references accumulate, and the reader is nudged to pay closer attention. Some details remain hazy, like missing pixels, yet the overall picture forms enough to draw you in, urging you to look closer and investigate for yourself. Questions of religious, cultural, and political belonging ripple beneath the surface of this story. This preoccupation with death and disappearance continues to echo throughout the stories.After the initial two stories, Aphrodite gets bolder and rather than a literary construction, we begin to see her intention of un-erasure: a conjuring of parts forgotten, lost, or deliberately erased, taking precedence over the telling of a story. In “One Hundred Perumals” and “Atlantic City”, she upends Western storytelling conventions by transporting us to worlds of oral lore and what feel like unedited, real-life conversations. We read dialogue in an English register so local that its drift is difficult to catch. The result is less straightforward enjoyment than a mix of curiosity and disorientation.A sharpened curiosityIf Aphrodite’s aim is to recover the parts of history left out of official records, what emerges are love affairs, dislocations, and private feelings of loss and nostalgia, all set against the backdrop of communist insurgencies, migrations, the search for a better life, the pursuit of a unified political identity, and, often, the repeated failure of the characters to reach any destination, emotionally, physically, or ideologically. The collection tells us of spies and lovers, of families torn apart and exiles with aching hearts. In one story, the narrator says, “In leaving her country, she made it a place to return to. She had made it an object of desire. That was something she had not foreseen.” Through the particular pains of the Malay, we see how an immigrant can never fully leave, and how an exile can never fully return.As for the geography, the jungle is never far. We enter it, navigate it, leave it, even observe it from the edge. The plantation is there too. We are often at borders. We see how borders are drawn, how they redefine, often, smother lives. We hear subaltern voices in all their tremulous doubt and veiled ferocity. A woman who hopelessly falls in love with a communist confesses, “I am not by nature someone bold. It is not in my skin to ask for something I want. I had been taught to put myself to the side, to hold back.” She holds on to the love in her heart even as her lover disappears, who knows for how long, who knows to which exact location.We are confronted by questions of transformation: what changes as a result of political struggle, who is forced to change, and in what ways. Borders, nomenclature, cultures, maps, ideologies, even relationships with oneself and others, all undergo shifts.By the final story, you start to learn a bit of Malay as you would any language, by catching words in the flow of sentences you already understand. You realise that sayang must mean something like darling or dear and that kedai runcit likely refers to a village grocery store.This is the collection’s quiet gift: not the warm satiation of a flawlessly shaped story cycle, not the ease of passive consumption, but a sharpened curiosity, cultural and historical both. It leaves the reader with a hunger to understand what “Malay” has held, and what it might yet hold. It alerts us to how urgently our literary imagination must keep decolonising its language, its narratives, its defaults.Rashmi Patel is a writer currently based in New Jersey. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in anthologies and publications across Australia, India, and the United States.The Unrepentant: Short Stories, Sharmini Aphrodite, Gaudy Boy.