No Presents Please
Mumbai Stories
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small–town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away.
Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai—a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution.
In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory–worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples’ affectations—”no presents please”—and look once more at what they own.
Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Kaikini's tender collection, strangers encounter one another with indelible consequences in Mumbai, a city "like a mother watching wakefully over all the children asleep on her lap." Kaikini's talent lies in his ability to simultaneously capture the humdrum routine of his characters' lives and plumb the depths of their desires. The opening story, "Interval," follows two strangers seduced by their love of movies, who dream of running away together in search of their happy ending. As their plans take shape, each realizes the fantasy of their adventure would be "filled with a pleasure that the actual meeting did not have," and in the end, the fantasy itself is enough to push them toward brave, new lives on their own. Other standouts include "Inside the Inner Room," in which a wife helps her husband's girlfriend through an operation and recovery, and "Toofan Mail," where an uninsured stuntman explains why he named himself after a train. In "Crescent Moon," a disgruntled bus driver steals a double-decker bus and drives it to his village for the annual Ganesh festival. The story brilliantly captures the "battle for dignity" faced by many of Kaikini's characters. These stories poignantly express the characters' feelings of triumph amid the limitations of circumstance.
