A hugely acclaimed collection of stories about the family— mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, and other ties of blood— by one of India’s greatest short-story writers. Unforgettable stories about the family; how it can be both harbour and exile. A man drifts away from family and home and becomes a monk, yet nothing fills the void; the only constants are dreams and hallucinations where his mother sometimes appears. Another son retreats to his room, then disappears; ten years later, the father, Sudhakar, doesn’t want to harbour false hope, but the mother, Hemlata, clings to it. Ardeshir and Firoza face a similar predicament—only, their daughter, Arnavaz, hasn’t gone missing; she lives with them, even in her absence. A woman, half-estranged from her mother, comes to visit her grandmother, perhaps for the last time. A son recounts the unremarkable life of his mother—‘more space than matter’—to the day she is taken to the vultures. The stories in this collection are among the finest explorations of family ties you will read. Keki Daruwalla, a great poet of our time, proves again that he was also a great master of the short story. ‘Daruwalla manages to give us, ...