No Presents Please
Mumbai Stories
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Winner: DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories is not about what Mumbai is, but what it enables. Here is a city where two young people decide to elope and then start nursing dreams of different futures, where film posters start talking to each other, where epiphanies are found in keychains and thermos-flasks. From Irani cafes to chawls, old cinema houses to reform homes, Jayant Kaikini seeks out and illuminates moments of existential anxiety and of tenderness. In these sixteen stories, gaps in the curtains of the ordinary open up to possibilities that might not have existed, but for this city where the surreal meets the everyday.
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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.
