Author: Keki N Daruwalla
Publisher: Ravi Dayal
Year: 1996
Language: English
Pages: 255
ISBN/UPC (if available): 81 7530 004 3
Description
This volume opens with a novella, The Minister for Permanent Unrest, a telling parable on unbridled state power of universal relevance, and is followed by seventeen short stories.
Author's range is wide and his imagination moves from the medieval city of Saqsin in the Arabian desert to Farrukhabad in 1857, and the Assam tea gardens in the 1920s. There are also two stories on Partition, but devoid of the blood and mayhem associated with fiction of that era.
Some of the stories like 'The Owlet Beats the Drum' and 'The Mud-Shrine' barely stop short of the metaphysical. They reveal a strong interest in the intricacies of theology, the reveling and unraveling of myth, and the how this affects the lives of various communities in India.