words by Millie Harris
Celeste Mohammed’s Ever Since We Small begins with a woman who refuses to die in the way she has been told she must. Jayanti is a young widow in India, expected to burn on her husband’s funeral pyre. This ending for her would mean that she burns, the family would mourn, Jayanti would be seen as a pious sacrifice, and the community would move on with its sense of order intact. Yet, as she embarks on that path, something changes. Instead, she seeks a different future for herself, something that has a domino effect on her future bloodline. In this book, Celeste Mohammed asks what it means for a family to live in the aftershock of Jayanti’s decision.
The novel is structured as a series of ten connected stories, each one centred on a member of the same lineage. It is not presented as a continuous chronological narrative, but the order does reflect the way family stories often do surface. Sometimes, you hear about an argument before you know how it began or you meet a resentful grandchild before you learn what made them feel that way. By shifting perspectives like this, Mohammed builds this sense of accumulating pressure across the book, where each story thickens and complicates the ones that come before it.
I did, at times, struggle with this structure. Returning to a character after several chapters away from them required me to pause and relearn how they were related to everyone else, to remember who had married whom, who is no longer present and who is. Yet, the very effort of reorienting myself felt quite true to the story itself. You do not inherit a family’s history in a perfectly understandable and straightforward narrative; instead, it is often something that is pieced together from half-remembered stories or differing versions of the same event. The book asks you to also do this, to be a part of the remembering itself.
The opening story, “The Legend of Jayanti”, is the one I definitely felt the most enraptured by. Mohammed writes Jayanti with such attention to the psychological impact of the conditions she is in. Jayanti enters marriage with expectations of stability and belonging, however, she instead finds herself subjected to persistent and inescapable judgement for not bearing a child in the time she has been married. She is made to accept responsibility for circumstances she did not create as the absence of a child is treated as her own personal failing. Over time, Jayanti sees herself through the eyes of those who condemn her, as someone who is lacking and incomplete. Then, when she makes her tumultuous shift into choosing life over accepting death, everything changes.
Jayanti’s commitment to die transformed into a commitment to live, a hope and curiosity for her future that she’d never felt before. What need had she of the afterlife, if happiness awaited in this one?
With this being said, I did not find the quality entirely consistent across all ten stories. The opening tale is so striking in its emotional intensity and narrative grip that it sets such an exceptionally high bar for what follows. So, by contrast, “Outsiders” was the story I struggled with the most. This chapter follows Shiva, Jayanti’s great-grandson, as he becomes cursed after accidentally drowning a buck, and is told so through the collective voice of the bois, the forest’s guardians. For me, for a chapter that is so rich plot-wise, it lacked the immersive force that made the other stories so compelling, and I found it much harder to keep the same level of investment while reading it. The stakes of what was happening felt understandable, but with so much happening, I felt less connected to a specific person to either root for or be against. In a linked collection of this kind, some unevenness may be inevitable, but this one stood out to me as the weakest of the ten. That said, the novel as a whole maintains its power regardless of this slightly less impactful story, and the stronger stories certainly do more than enough to carry the emotional and thematic spine of the tale being told.
As the narrative moves into Trinidad, the novel is equally attentive to the culture and social life here as it was in its previous story in India. Mohammed situates her characters within Indo-Trinidadian and Indo-Muslim communities, and you see that most clearly in the language. Characters use Indo-Trinidadian vocabulary and dialect on the page which, at the start, did mean I found myself quickly Googling a few terms to make sure I was keeping up, but after a while I stopped needing to. The more time I spent in their world, the more the meanings settled through repetition and context. Personally, I loved how that aspect of the novel ensured I listen properly and meet these voices where they are, to seek these stories with intent.
Mohammed’s prose is another reason this book works so well. There are moments where it feels quite lyrical, particularly when the narrative lingers in memory or within an emotional moment, but the lyricism is never so polished that it loses the roughness of what these characters endure. It felt like the book was constantly shifting between softness and blunt honesty in a way that honestly suited these characters and their lives.
Shiva did always insist he want to cremate. Maybe he did know a secret that the rest of we didn’t know. Maybe he did understand that he had something inside of him that he needed to burn ‘way for he soul to come pure gold.
I also felt particularly connected to the relationship between the two sisters, Salma and Yasmeen. They began as such kindred spirits, connected by such instinctive loyalty and shared determination to protect what they have with one another. I know I felt extremely tempted to believe that their closeness could be enough to insulate them from everything else threatening to tear them apart. Yet, the further the story unfolds, the clearer their lack of autonomy in their own lives becomes when decisions made, by both their parents and husbands, bend their paths away from each other. I found those chapters genuinely sad to read, for what existed between them alongside what neither of them could quite manage to defend. They remained, essentially, two women trying to navigate systems that were never designed for their happiness, but for their duty. Salma’s story in particular reminded me of Jayanti’s: the same sense of wanting change so deeply, but finding again and again that it’s out of reach.
If Allah saved her life today, she’d never ask her girls to be ‘good’ and she’d never marry them off — they would have to choose when to leave her, for she would never, ever leave them. In fact, she swore, as her eyes closed, she would teach Nadya and Abby to be ‘bad’, to fight for their happiness like their lives depended on it, like no one was coming to save them. Because in the end, no one was.
Mohammed also incorporates magical realism within the novel with elements of Trinidadian folklore. Figures such as Douens and Bucks appear, pushing the novel’s exploration of inheritance even further. Douens are child spirits associated with lost or unbaptised children, whilst Bucks are small, human-like, supernatural creatures associated with bringing wealth or success to its owner (as long as it’s treated correctly). Jayanti also sees Goddess’ when she’s on the pyre and awaiting her death, where they encourage her to look at life in a different way. The folkloric elements suggest that what is passed down can feel uncanny, burdensome, even inescapable. Because of that, the ending really worked for me. The last section may lean more into the magical realist side, but it still feels like the same book I started with. It never forgets that this is about a family we’ve come to know over ten stories and how this cycle, that is bigger than them, can reach its end.
Would you reverse the alchemy by which their inheritance of iron shackles has been refined into bangles of gold?
The thing that impressed me most overall, though, was Mohammed’s control of voice across the different stories. With so many perspectives across different generations, it would be easy for the characters to blur into each other, but they don’t. Each one feels like a specific person with their own way of seeing things. You can tell who is speaking by more than just their circumstances, but by what they notice, what they gloss over or what they misinterpret. They stay human and messy and individual, which is exactly what makes their story hit as hard as it does. From this, decisions made by characters we meet shape the possibilities available to those who follow.
In the end, Ever Since We Small felt to me like being handed a box of old family stories and photographs, then discovering how they all fit together. It’s heartfelt, it’s readable, and there are characters in here I’m still thinking about. Even where the collection felt uneven to me, Mohammed’s distinct handling of voice, her vivid prose, and the cumulative power of the family’s stories had such a deeply affecting impact on me as a reader. By the end, the book questions what it means to return to the past, to recognise it, and to decide what can be carried forward differently. It asks us, what are we going to do with the life we have been given?
--
Millie Harris studied English Literature at York St. John University, graduating with a First Class Honours, alongside reviewing books for Zimmer’s Book of the Month column. As Literature Editor, she curates and plans the magazine’s Literature section. Aside from her work at Zimmer, Millie is extremely passionate about film, books and all things media. She spends her spare time researching, reading and being with her cat. Millie has happily been a part of Zimmer since the beginning and has loved every moment!